June 25, 2026 Joan Wallach Scott and the Politics of the Category Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Joan Wallach Scott and the Politics of the Category

Posted on June 25, 2026 by Luke Ford

Joan Wallach Scott (born December 18, 1941) is an American historian whose work changed the study of gender, feminism, and modern French history. She established gender as a central category of historical analysis rather than a specialized corner of women’s history. By joining social history to post-structuralist theory, she altered how historians understand power, identity, language, and evidence. Her influence reaches beyond history into political theory, literary studies, anthropology, sociology, legal scholarship, and feminist philosophy.

She was born Joan Wallach in Brooklyn, New York, into a family of public school teachers who valued ideas and argument. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University in 1962 and her doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1969. She trained first as a labor historian. Her early research examined class formation and workers’ political movements in nineteenth-century France. Her first book, The Glassworkers of Carmaux: French Craftsmen and Political Action in a Nineteenth-Century City (1974), carried the mark of Marxist social history, the dominant approach in the profession at the time.

Second-wave feminism redirected her career. With Louise Tilly (1930-2018) she published Women, Work and Family (1978), an early study to bring women’s labor into mainstream social history. Scott soon decided that recovering the stories of forgotten women left the deeper problem untouched. The conceptual frame that had excluded them remained in place. She stopped asking where women belonged in history and began asking how the categories “man” and “woman” had come to be made.

Her decisive intervention came in 1986 with “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” published in the American Historical Review. The essay holds that gender is more than a biological distinction and more than a synonym for women. Gender is a primary system through which societies organize power, assign meaning, build institutions, and define identities. As class and race shape political life, so gender shapes language, symbolism, and law. The essay founded the modern field of gender history in the English-speaking academy and became a standard citation across the discipline.

Scott became a leading figure in the profession’s linguistic turn. Drawing on Michel Foucault (1926-1984), Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), and Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), she held that language does more than describe reality. Language helps constitute it. Categories such as citizen, worker, woman, nation, equality, and rights are not timeless facts. They emerge under particular historical conditions and serve particular ends.

From Foucault she took the insight that power produces subjects rather than only repressing them. From Derrida she took deconstruction, a method for exposing the contradictions buried inside concepts that present themselves as self-evident. Her later turn to Lacanian psychoanalysis let her examine the unconscious desires and fantasies that hold social identities together. This combination set her apart from earlier feminist historians, many of whom assumed that women shared a universal experience standing free of culture and language.

Her critique of method found its sharpest form in “The Evidence of Experience” (1991), published in Critical Inquiry. There she challenged the common assumption that the lived experience of marginalized groups offers an unmediated ground for historical truth. Experience, she argued, is the thing that requires explanation, not the source of it. Individuals understand their lives through the languages and categories a culture makes available. The historian cannot simply recover authentic experience. He must analyze how experience comes to be produced. The essay set off a defining methodological debate of the late twentieth century and remains widely taught across history, literary studies, anthropology, and gender studies.

These arguments developed further in Gender and the Politics of History (1988), a collection that showed how gender organizes phenomena that look unrelated and pressed historians to examine the assumptions buried in their own categories.

Scott’s historical research stays fixed on modern France. In Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996), she examined the bind facing French feminists after the Revolution. Universal declarations of equality promised rights to all citizens while defining the citizen in masculine terms. Women faced a lasting paradox. To claim equality they had to stress their sameness with men, yet they also had to assert a difference the political order treated as grounds for exclusion. Scott placed this contradiction at the center of modern democratic politics.

Universalism became a recurring theme. In Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism (2005), she examined debates over gender quotas in French politics and argued that a citizenship offered as universal often hides particular assumptions about sex. She carried the critique forward in The Politics of the Veil (2007), a study of France’s ban on Islamic headscarves in public schools. Scott held that the controversy exposed contradictions inside French republican secularism rather than a clean conflict between modernity and religion.

Her framework kept evolving in The Fantasy of Feminist History (2011), where she brought Lacanian psychoanalysis into her historical method. Gender identity, she argued, is never fully secured or made stable. Political systems and individuals keep trying to fix it and keep failing. This turn complemented her earlier Foucauldian stress on discourse by accounting for the unconscious investments people hold in gender categories.

She widened the critique of secularism in Sex and Secularism (2017). She rejected the assumption that secular societies produce gender equality by nature. Modern secularism and modern gender hierarchy grew up together. Liberal democracies often cast themselves as emancipated while portraying religious minorities, Muslims above all, as uniquely patriarchal. That contrast, she argued, hides the inequalities that persist inside secular societies.

Questions of knowledge and institutional authority form another major strand. In Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom (2019), Scott defended the university as a home for critical inquiry rather than for ideological conformity. Academic freedom, she argued, protects disagreement, revision, and uncertainty, and guarantees no fixed political result. The argument grew from theory and from practice. For many years she chaired Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure at the American Association of University Professors.

Her 2020 book, On the Judgment of History, carried these concerns into the politics of memory. Drawn from the Ruth Benedict Lectures at Columbia University, the book examines how societies try to face historical injustice through commissions, transitional justice, and public acts of remembrance. She takes up South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and postwar European efforts to face fascism and collaboration. History becomes a contested arena where societies negotiate responsibility, guilt, justice, and reconciliation. For Scott, historical judgment stays contested and contingent. Readings of the past answer to politics as much as to moral principle.

Across her career Scott questions concepts that pass as self-evident. She asks how gender, equality, experience, identity, citizenship, secularism, and universalism came into being, whose interests they serve, and what relations of power they sustain. Her work moves historical inquiry from the recovery of facts toward the study of the political processes through which facts acquire authority.

Institutionally, Scott helped build gender studies into a major field. She taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Brown University, where she founded the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. In 1985 she joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She later held the Harold F. Linder Chair in the School of Social Science and became Professor Emerita in 2014. She was a founding editor of History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History.

Scott has stayed active as a public intellectual since her retirement, publishing through the 2020s on academic freedom, universities, feminism, democratic politics, and historical method. Her influence runs through generations of students and through the institutions she helped build. Brown University’s Pembroke Center awards the annual Joan Wallach Scott Prize for scholarship in gender and sexuality studies. In 2018 the French government named her a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur for her contribution to French intellectual life.

Her work has drawn sustained criticism. Some scholars hold that her stress on discourse slights economic structure, material conditions, and lived social experience. Others argue that her skepticism toward stable identities complicates political organizing and weakens claims to objective truth. Scott answers that exposing the historical contingency of a concept does not disarm political action. It shows that institutions and identities are made rather than given, which opens them to criticism and to change.

Scott is a major historian of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. She turned gender into a central category of historical analysis. She also reshaped debate over evidence, experience, identity, universalism, secularism, and academic freedom. She helped move the profession from the recovery of marginalized subjects toward the questioning of the categories through which history gets written.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology challenges the post-structuralist historiography and feminist theory of Joan Wallach Scott.
Scott operates on the premise that foundational categories—such as man, woman, equality, and individual identity—are not fixed realities, but language-based constructions. Her scholarship, including Gender and the Politics of History (1988) and Only Paradoxes to Offer (1996), uses deconstruction to show how political power builds and enforces these binary oppositions to maintain historical hierarchies. For Scott, power is linguistic and discursive, meaning that challenging knowledge claims is a primary way to contest political dominance.
Mearsheimer’s realism dismantles Scott’s post-structuralist framework on many fronts.
In her famous 1986 essay, Scott argues that gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power, treating masculine and feminine identities as entirely constructed through language and discourse to justify social hierarchies.
If Mearsheimer is right, gender roles are not arbitrary linguistic structures that can be deconstructed by critical analysis. They are functional arrangements designed for group survival. Throughout human history, societies have specialized roles to protect the long childhood of human offspring and to maximize collective cohesion against rival groups. What Scott diagnoses as a discursive operation of power is the standard operating setup of the social animal under conditions of anarchic competition. A society that fails to maintain these functional, cohesive structures in favor of fluid, deconstructed identity projects risks fracturing the very unit that ensures its security.
Scott’s historical method relies on the post-structuralist belief that by analyzing the linguistic contradictions within historical texts, scholars can expose the unstable nature of power and open up possibilities for political resistance and individual agency.
Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of human preferences destroys this linguistic optimism. Independent reason and deconstructive analysis arrive late and rank last among human motivations, falling far behind the unreflective survival instincts of the group. The intense value infusion a person receives during childhood socialization wires the mind for group loyalty long before he ever encounters literary theory or historical critique. The deep, non-rational attachments that keep an individual embedded in his tribe are not linguistic illusions that can be unraveled by a clever reading of text. They are fixed by early conditioning to ensure group survival under conditions of structural anarchy.
Scott has spent her career using post-structuralist theory to critique traditional academic standards and institutional hierarchies, treating her work as an emancipatory challenge to dominant structures of knowledge.
In The Politics of the Veil (2007), Scott analyzes the 2004 French ban on wearing conspicuous religious symbols, like the Islamic headscarf, in public schools. She argues that the ban was not a neutral defense of secularism, but an arbitrary nationalist construction designed to define French identity by excluding Muslim women and policing their bodies through state discourse.
Mearsheimer’s realism strips this narrative of its focus on linguistic identity politics, explaining the ban through the logic of state consolidation. The French state does not pass secular legislation because it is caught in a discursive trap about its own identity. In an anarchic world where a state must maintain maximum internal cohesion to project power and survive, a highly un-integrated, distinct sub-coalition within its borders represents a structural vulnerability.
The ban on the veil is a direct, material exertion of power by the dominant coalition to enforce uniform socialization on all citizens during childhood. The state uses the school system as an optimization tool to ensure that primary loyalty belongs to the state vehicle, not a rival transnational religious group. Scott treats the veil controversy as a crisis of discursive exclusion; Mearsheimer’s model shows it is the standard behavior of a tribe using state levers to eliminate internal fractures.
In Only Paradoxes to Offer, Scott examines the history of French feminists who demanded political rights during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She claims they were trapped in a permanent linguistic paradox: they had to argue for equality based on a universal concept of the “individual,” yet they had to organize specifically as “women” to protest their exclusion, thereby reinforcing the very gender difference that barred them from equality.
Mearsheimer’s ranking of human faculties resolves Scott’s paradox by removing its focus on language. The individual citizen does not navigate political systems through abstract textual coherence. The concept of the autonomous, unconditioned “individual” is a philosophical fiction.
The French feminists were not trapped by a linguistic contradiction; they were operating under the immutable laws of group competition. To challenge the ruling male coalition for status and resources, they had to form a cohesive sub-coalition of their own. They used the universal language of individual rights as an ideological standard to manage their reputation and claim moral authority, while simultaneously using group solidarity to mobilize power. The paradox Scott identifies exists only if one assumes that abstract reason governs politics; realism shows it is simply a standard tactical negotiation between competing interest blocks.
A foundational premise of Scott’s entire body of work is that language creates social reality, and that meaning is permanently unstable and open to endless contestation. She treats political systems as webs of text that can be rewritten to redistribute power.
Mearsheimer’s framework counters that language does not create material reality; material reality drives the use of language. The human animal did not develop communication to engage in endless, unstable textual play. Language evolved as a practical instrument to coordinate collective action, signal in-group loyalty, and defend the tribe against external threats.
The meaning of political concepts like liberty, equality, or sovereignty does not shift because of autonomous changes in linguistic discourse. The definitions change because dominant coalitions alter their ideological standards to match new material conditions, resource shifts, or structural conflicts. By treating language as the primary source of power rather than as a tool used by physical groups to secure their survival, Scott mistakes the smoke for the engine.
Mearsheimer’s model, paired with alliance theory, strips the radical idealism from this project. The push to institutionalize gender studies and post-structuralist critique within elite universities was not a neutral triumph of critical insight. It was a sophisticated strategy deployed by an elite intellectual coalition. By organizing around a shared moral creed and a specialized vocabulary, Scott and her allies successfully claimed institutional power, rewarded loyal partners, managed reputations, and policed boundaries against their status rivals in the traditional academic establishment. Their deconstructive theory did not escape the logic of power; it was the specific instrument they used to build and defend their own tribe.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof is right, Scott’s sophisticated post-structuralist framework is an elite masking operation. Her work treats political and social struggles as an linguistic or conceptual trap, when they are actually a raw competition for dominance.
Scott argued that language does not simply reflect the world; language constructs the world. In her view, inequalities are maintained because people are trapped by dominant discourses, binary oppositions, and historical definitions that shape how they think. Her solution is relentless deconstruction—interrogating texts, exposing contradictions, and destabilizing language to strip away the power of dominant ideologies.
From Pinsof’s perspective, societies do not maintain hierarchies because they are under the spell of a bad linguistic formula. They maintain hierarchies because dominant coalitions use every tool available to secure resources, status, and control over the state.
By framing a raw power struggle as a problem of “discourse” and “linguistic construction,” Scott created an exclusive market for her own profession. If power is locked inside complex linguistic codes, then the public cannot liberate themselves without an elite theorist to deconstruct the text. The concept of discourse becomes an intellectual barrier to entry that transforms a basic human conflict over material advantage into an academic decoding project.
In Only Paradoxes to Offer, Scott analyzed how French feminists had to claim universal human rights while simultaneously asserting their specific difference as women. She framed this as an inherent, unresolved paradox within the structure of liberal democracy, which promises universality but relies on exclusion.
Pinsof’s logic shows that this “paradox” is not a conceptual glitch in the liberal blueprint. It is a description of how elite groups negotiate their own interests. The universalist language of early liberal democracy was a weapon used by one coalition to seize power from the monarchy. The subsequent feminist challenge was a rational counter-raid by another faction to claim their share of state control.
By analyzing this as a deep philosophical paradox rather than a standard Darwinian turf war, Scott elevated the role of the academic. The theorist positions himself above both the traditional liberals and the raw activists, serving as the sophisticated chronicler who understands the deep structural flaws of the system.
Scott was a central figure in the academic culture wars, defending post-structuralism and gender studies against conservative critics who championed traditional history and objective facts. She framed her defense as a fight for intellectual freedom and critical thinking against narrow-minded dogmatism.
Under Pinsof’s frame, this academic debate was a zero-sum war over institutional real estate and credentials. The old guard of historians gained status through standard archival research and narratives of national progress. By introducing post-structuralism, Scott and her allies rendered that older expertise obsolete.
You cannot navigate the modern university without mastering the specialized vocabulary of gender analysis and discourse theory. The “New Cultural History” was an effective lever used to displace an entrenched academic rival and secure jobs, prestige, and institutional control for a new progressive coalition of professors, ensuring their own continuous seat at the top of the cultural hierarchy.

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Lynn Hunt and the Cultural Turn

Posted on June 25, 2026 by Luke Ford

Lynn Avery Hunt (b. 1945) remade the study of the French Revolution and the wider practice of cultural history. Her work pulled historical scholarship away from explanations built on class and economic structure toward the study of culture, language, symbol, gender, emotion, and the historical self. She joined archival method to questions drawn from anthropology, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and political philosophy, and she became an architect of what scholars call the new cultural history. She made her name as a historian of the Revolution. Her later work reached into historiography, globalization, method, and the origins of modern ideas about rights and identity.

She was born in Panama on November 16, 1945, and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her father, Richard Hunt, worked as an electrical engineer and kept up a lifelong interest in distant places through ham radio. Her mother, Ruby Hunt, became a figure in Minnesota Democratic politics and rose to county commissioner. Hunt grew up with two sisters in a state known for grassroots activism and outsider candidates, and she has traced her interest in political life in part to that home. Her parents taught her that ideas carry weight alongside actions and that a daughter holds the same prospects as a son.

She earned her bachelor’s degree from Carleton College in 1967, graduating magna cum laude, then completed a master’s degree at Stanford University in 1968 and a doctorate there in 1973. Her dissertation examined the municipal revolution of 1789 in Troyes and Reims. From that local study came her first book, Revolution and Urban Politics in Provincial France (1978), which won the Prix Albert Babeau in 1980. The book reads as a traditional monograph on political sociology, yet it set the questions about sociability and democratic practice that occupied her for the rest of her career.

Hunt taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1974 to 1987, then at the University of Pennsylvania from 1987 to 1998 as Annenberg Professor. In 1998 she moved to the University of California, Los Angeles, where she held the Eugen Weber Professorship of Modern European History until 2013 and now serves as Distinguished Research Professor and Eugen Weber Professor Emerita. She presided over the American Historical Association in 2002. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, distinguished teaching awards at Berkeley in 1977 and at UCLA in 2013, and the Nancy Lyman Roelker mentorship award from the American Historical Association in 2010. She holds fellowships in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the British Academy. Her books have appeared in fourteen languages.

Her reputation rests first on her reading of the French Revolution. Earlier historians explained the Revolution through class conflict, economic change, or the reform of institutions. Hunt argued that revolutionary politics also ran on culture. Symbols, rituals, ceremonies, language, and images did not decorate political change. They produced it. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984), which won a prize from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, became a founding text of the cultural turn. The book owed something to François Furet (1927-1997) and his attention to revolutionary discourse, yet Hunt built her own set of questions about republican political culture.

She treated festivals and propaganda as the substance of political life rather than its surface. She studied the way the king’s image gave way on coins and seals to republican figures such as Liberty and Hercules. She read the tricolor cockade, the Liberty tree, and the civic festival as claims about who held sovereignty. Even clothing carried a politics, as the aristocrat’s knee breeches yielded to the long trousers of the sans-culottes, whose name announced the change. These shifts in image and dress, Hunt argued, built new senses of citizenship and collective identity. Law and constitution moved politics, and so did the symbols that taught ordinary people how to picture themselves.

This argument shaped the new cultural history. Hunt held that institutions resist explanation apart from the systems of meaning that hold them up, and that political conduct stays bound to language, representation, and shared assumption. Ideas, on her account, work as historical agents and not as the shadows of economic force. As editor of The New Cultural History (1989), she gathered historians drawn to anthropology, literary criticism, and post-structuralism. She borrowed from Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) and Michel Foucault (1926-1984) and pressed historians to read discourse, ritual, and symbol alongside structures of power and wealth. She set herself apart from the more skeptical theorists by insisting that fresh theory stay tied to archival evidence.

Her study of gender during the Revolution took its boldest form in The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992). Drawing on Freud and Lacan, she argued that revolutionary politics returned again and again to the figures of the family. The execution of Louis XVI (1754-1793) carried the charge of the father’s destruction, while Marie Antoinette (1755-1793) gathered around herself the era’s fears about motherhood, sex, and the legitimacy of rule. Arguments over citizenship and authority moved with changing ideas about manhood, womanhood, and the family. Admirers praised the book’s reach. Critics asked whether psychoanalytic categories could carry the weight of an entire political culture. Some social historians held that symbol displaced material conflict, and some feminist scholars worried that the focus on imagery drew attention from the legal exclusion of women. The book remains a landmark in cultural history and gender studies, and several journals devoted forums to it.

Hunt extended this interest in the body and the image through edited volumes on eroticism and pornography. Eroticism and the Body Politic (1991) and The Invention of Pornography (1993) gathered essays on the place of sexual representation in early modern politics. Her own contribution on Marie Antoinette read the obscene pamphlets and prints aimed at the queen as expressions of anxiety about feminine power and royal excess, and as tools that helped strip the monarchy of its standing.

Method and epistemology drew her next. With Joyce Appleby (1929-2016) and Margaret Jacob (b. 1943) she wrote Telling the Truth About History (1994) during the culture wars over national history, multiculturalism, and the authority of the discipline. The book set itself against a triumphal national story and against the harder forms of postmodern doubt. Hunt argued that historians write from a place and a perspective, yet that evidence, method, and open criticism let the discipline build accounts of the past that earn trust. She made the same case in many forums and reviews, and she has held to it since.

Inventing Human Rights: A History (2007) stands as her best-known book outside French history. She declined to explain modern rights through Enlightenment philosophy or constitutional design alone. She argued that a change in feeling made universal rights thinkable. The eighteenth-century epistolary novel let readers enter the inner lives of strangers whose circumstances differed from their own. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) taught a habit of fellow feeling across the lines of rank, and that habit prepared the ground for the declarations of rights in the American and French Revolutions. The book also reached toward neuroscience, drawing on research into empathy and the plasticity of the brain to suggest that sustained reading might train new capacities for feeling. Some intellectual historians found the biological turn speculative. The philosopher Samuel Moyn (b. 1972) pressed a different objection, holding that the book mistook episodic empathy for durable principle. The argument has shaped debate across legal history and international relations all the same.

Her attention to the shape of historical knowledge continued through Measuring Time, Making History (2008), which examined chronology and periodization, and Writing History in the Global Era (2014), which argued that a global age calls historians past the national frame while holding them to the archive. She warned against presentism, the habit of judging the past by present concern. For Hunt, history loses much of its use when historians give up the effort to grasp earlier societies on their own terms.

The Book That Changed Europe (2010), written with Margaret Jacob and Wijnand Mijnhardt, studied the illustrated comparative survey of world religions produced by Bernard Picart (1673-1733) and argued that it nudged European readers toward toleration by showing many faiths in a sympathetic light. History: Why It Matters (2018) makes a public case for historical thinking in an age of polarization and misinformation, holding that history trains judgment, a sense of context, and a tolerance for complexity that democratic life requires. Across decades she also wrote and revised widely used textbooks, among them The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures and The French Revolution and Napoleon: Crucible of the Modern World (2017), which carry her scholarship to students.

Her recent book, The Revolutionary Self: Social Change and the Emergence of the Modern Individual, 1770-1800 (2025), returns to questions that have run through her career. She traces the rise of the modern individual through the small changes of daily life: tea and the conversation of the sexes in Britain, women who entered the studios of Paris as artists, printmakers whose ribald images let the lower classes laugh at their betters, soldiers who rose in the revolutionary army by skill rather than birth, and the financial instruments that bound citizens to a new idea of the nation. The book argues that the modern self came less from philosophy than from shifts in how people lived, and it ties together the themes of The Family Romance of the French Revolution and Inventing Human Rights.

Hunt took up much of what linguistic theory, anthropology, and post-structuralism offered, and she declined their more skeptical conclusions. She treats historical narratives as constructed interpretations rather than transparent windows on the past, and she insists that evidence, archive, and open debate make real knowledge of the past attainable. She has kept to a middle position between a naive faith in objectivity and a thoroughgoing relativism.

Her reach extends well past French history. Scholars in cultural history, gender studies, intellectual history, human rights, historiography, and global history draw on her work, and Google Scholar records tens of thousands of citations. She helped win for prints, clothing, ceremony, iconography, and public ritual a standing as historical evidence rather than illustration. Critics still argue that her stress on culture understates economic and institutional force. Even so, she changed the questions historians ask. She showed that men and women fight revolutions over armies, constitutions, and taxes, and also over language, symbol, feeling, and the collective imagination, and her career remains a model of interdisciplinary history joined to careful archival work.

The Manufacture of the Obvious: Lynn Hunt and the Hero System of the Self-Evident

A historian stands at a lectern and reads a sentence the room already believes. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. The students nod. The sentence is the floor they stand on, and a floor draws no attention. Lynn Hunt (b. 1945) reads it a second time and asks the question that built her career. If the truth is self-evident, why did almost no one see it for most of human history?

The question sounds like a trick. It is the opposite of a trick. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) wrote that line for men who owned other men, in a world where torture stood in the law codes and where the breaking of a criminal’s body on the wheel drew a holiday crowd. The truth was not evident to them. It became evident, and the becoming has a date and a cause, and Hunt spent decades in the archives finding both. Her answer runs through novels and pain and the eighteenth-century habit of feeling another man’s body as one’s own. She argued that the self-evident was made. She also argued that it is true. Holding both at once is her life’s knot, and it is the knot worth pulling.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives us the tool. A man cannot live as the animal he is, knowing he will die, unless he believes his short life counts in some scheme that outlasts it. Cultures supply the scheme. Each one hands out a ladder of significance, a set of roles and sacred values by which a man earns the feeling that he is a hero in a drama larger than his body. The ladder is the hero system. Its best trick, the one that keeps the terror down, is to make its own rungs feel like the grain of reality. Inside a working hero system the local arrangement reads as the structure of the world. It reads as self-evident. So the word self-evident is the fingerprint a hero system leaves on the things it has built. Find a value a people treats as beyond argument, and you have found the place where they have hidden their fear and staked their immortality.

Hunt’s sacred value is the autonomous, feeling, rights-bearing individual. The man who owns himself, whose inner life is real, whose pain obligates a stranger, whose dignity needs no warrant from blood or birth or revelation. Her books are a long defense of how this being came to be and why his arrival changed everything. The festivals and the toppled royal seal in Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution; the family at the center of the revolutionary imagination in The Family Romance of the French Revolution; the novel reader weeping over a servant girl’s letters in Inventing Human Rights; the soldier who rose by skill and the woman who took up the painter’s brush in The Revolutionary Self. Different rooms, one figure walking through them. The modern self, assembled in the eighteenth century out of tea tables and prints and epistolary fiction, then declared eternal in a sentence at Philadelphia.

Her immortality project sits inside the discipline she defends. The historian earns her place in a chain of knowing. She adds a true thing to a body of durable knowledge, she is cited, she is read by the small number of people who decide what counts as known in her corner of the world, and the addition survives her. Telling the Truth About History reads as a creed under the scholarship. Against the relativist who says all accounts of the past are equal, Hunt holds that evidence and open criticism let the discipline build something that earns trust. The dead can be known. That is her wager against oblivion. If the dead cannot be known, the historian’s work is a private comfort and nothing more, and Hunt cannot accept that the work is nothing more.

Now take her sacred word, the self-evident dignity of the individual, into other rooms, and watch it change.

In a Trappist cloister a monk rises at three in the morning for the night office. He has read Hunt, in the years before. He grants the history. He denies the value. For him the self is the thing to be lost. Autonomy is the first sin, the reach for a self apart from God, the apple. He says it plainly across the refectory table, where no one speaks during meals and a brother reads aloud from a life of a saint.

The individual you want me to honor, he says afterward in the garden, is the wound. I am here to let it close.

His immortality is not symbolic. He believes it. He empties the self so that something larger can fill the space, and what fills it does not die. The self-evident truth in his hero system is God, present in the silence, and the rights-bearing individual is a clever idol the world built to worship itself. Hunt’s whole cast of weeping novel readers strikes him as men learning to feel their own importance and calling the feeling virtue.

Cross the world to a beis midrash where a young man sways over a folio of Talmud and argues a point with his study partner at a volume that would, in any other room, signal a fight. He has never heard of Lynn Hunt. The concept she defends he would name and reject in the same breath. The autonomous conscience, the inner self that judges for itself, he calls the yetzer hara wearing a clean shirt. The good life runs through bittul, the nullification of the self before something received. At Sinai the people said we will do and we will hear, the doing before the understanding, obedience as the door to truth and not its reward.

What is self-evident to you, his teacher asks the room, the giving of the Torah, or your own opinion?

For this young man the self-evident is matan Torah, the revelation witnessed by a whole people and carried down an unbroken chain of transmission to the man at the front of his own room. He does not own himself. He is a link. His significance is to receive without loss and to pass on without loss, and the chain is his answer to death, older and harder than any historian’s footnote. Hunt’s eighteenth-century individual, cut loose from the chain to feel his way to morality through fiction, would strike the teacher as a man who has lost the thread and mistaken the loss for freedom.

Down a glass corridor in a research university a behavioral geneticist pulls up a slide of twin correlations and tells a seminar that the autonomous self is a story the brain runs to keep itself moving. Herizability sits near half for most of what we call character. The choices a man takes pride in track the alleles he did not choose. Empathy, the engine Hunt placed at the origin of rights, the geneticist files under evolved disposition, a kin-directed tool that misfires onto strangers and novel characters because the machinery cannot tell a real face from a described one.

She thinks people invented rights by learning to cry over a novel, a postdoc says, half a question.

They learned to cry because crying over kin paid off for two million years, the geneticist answers. The novel is the misfire. Useful misfire. Still a misfire.

His self-evident truth is the additive variance, the replication, the number that holds across samples. The individual, for him, is a bundle held together by a narrative, and the narrative is the last thing to trust. His immortality is the durable result, the finding that outlives the funding, his name on the paper others build on. He and Hunt both worship a true thing that outlasts them. They disagree about whether the rights-bearing self is among the true things or among the stories the true things explain.

And in a renovated warehouse south of a freeway a founder in a four-hundred-dollar plain T-shirt explains to investors that death is an engineering problem with a ship date. The self is information. Information does not care what it runs on. Carry it off the failing biology and the man persists. Autonomy, for him, means release from the body, the final upgrade.

Your historian, he tells a journalist, wrote the story of a draft. We ship the next version.

His self-evident truth is that the limit can be removed, that the terror Becker named is not a permanent condition but a bug awaiting a patch. Hunt’s individual, mortal and made of tea tables and tears, is to him a beautiful obsolete thing, the way a hand-copied manuscript is beautiful and obsolete. Where the monk empties the self to escape death and the young man passes himself down the chain to escape it, the founder proposes to keep the self and delete the death, and he treats this as obvious, which is the surest sign that he too lives inside a hero system and cannot see its walls.

Five rooms, one word, five worlds. The monk’s autonomy is sin, the student’s is the evil inclination, the geneticist’s is a useful fiction, the founder’s is an upgrade, and Hunt’s is the hard-won achievement of modern life and the ground of every claim a man can make against power. None of them is confused about the word. Each has placed it inside a different drama of significance, and inside each drama it carries a different charge, the way a coin carries a different value across a border.

Here Hunt’s position turns rare, and the rarity is the reason to write about her at all. She is not a believer reporting from inside her hero system, untroubled. She is the historian who proved her own sacred value was assembled at a known time by known means, and who then declined the conclusion that assembly implies fraud. The geneticist and she stand on the same ground. They both know the rights-bearing self has a natural history. He says therefore it is a story. She says therefore it is a human achievement, and an achievement is real. The novel reader’s tears were a misfire that built the abolition of torture, and Hunt looks at the abolition of torture and refuses to call it nothing.

This is the courage in her, and Becker helps us name it. The ordinary hero takes his ladder for the structure of the world and never looks down. Hunt looked down. She mapped the scaffolding under the floor everyone stands on and kept standing. She holds the self-evident as a thing that men made and a thing that is true, and she carries the contradiction without resolving it, because resolving it in either direction would cost her the value she lives for. Call the rights-bearing self merely invented and you hand the torturer his argument. Call it simply given and you have to ignore the archive, and the archive is her vocation, her ladder, her wager against the dark.

The students in the first room file out believing the sentence they walked in believing. Hunt gathers her notes. She knows what the monk would say, and the young man over the folio, and the geneticist, and the man in the plain T-shirt who plans to live forever. She knows the word means something else in each of their worlds. She also knows which world she will die defending, and she has read enough history to know that this, the willingness to die defending a manufactured floor, is the oldest human thing there is.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology undermines the cultural history and moral optimism of Lynn Hunt (b. 1945), specifically her landmark thesis in Inventing Human Rights: A History (2007).
Hunt argues that the concept of universal human rights did not appear out of thin air; it was built in the eighteenth century through a cultural transformation driven by the rise of the epistolary novel (such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie). She claims that reading these novels trained individuals to empathize across traditional social, class, and gender boundaries, creating an “imagined empathy” that ultimately served as the psychological foundation for the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the American Declaration of Independence. For Hunt, human rights are an active moral awakening of individual consciousness.
Mearsheimer’s realism upends Hunt’s framework across many fronts.
Hunt positions the expansion of individual empathy as a durable historical achievement—a new cognitive baseline that permanently altered the human capacity for universal moral reasoning.
Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of human preferences reveals the structural fragility of this claim. Individual reason and text-based empathy rank last among human motivations, falling far behind the unreflective survival instincts of the group. The capacity to read a novel and feel deep empathy for an outsider is a secondary luxury product that can only occur within a highly secure, wealthy, and stable society that faces no immediate existential threats. What Hunt tracks in the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie is not a permanent evolution of human nature, but the temporary softening of tribal boundaries that occurs during rare moments of elite security. The moment that baseline security fractures, the thin, aesthetic empathy cultivated by the novel is instantly discarded, and the social animal returns to the exclusionary, protective logic of the tribe.
Hunt treats the 1776 and 1789 declarations of universal human rights as the political manifestation of this new, shared empathetic consciousness. She views them as texts designed to lift humanity into a post-tribal era of universal dignity.
Mearsheimer’s realism strips this narrative of its idealism, explaining the declarations through the logic of coalition consolidation. The language of universal human rights was not a neutral expression of global empathy; it was the ideological standard deployed by a rising bourgeois coalition to challenge the power, status, and legitimacy of the traditional aristocratic and monarchical establishment. By claiming that their parochial political goals were actually universal human rights, the revolutionary elites successfully managed their reputations, signaled internal loyalty, and mobilized a broad population against their domestic rivals. The universal language was an instrument used to capture and optimize the state machinery for the survival and dominance of the new ruling group.
The historical trajectory immediately following Hunt’s “invention” of human rights provides the ultimate validation of Mearsheimer’s thesis over her own. The very same French generation that celebrated the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 quickly descended into the Reign of Terror, mass conscription, and the aggressive imperialist conquests of the Napoleonic Wars.
In Inventing Human Rights, Hunt argues that the rise of individual empathy in the eighteenth century led to a structural transformation in how societies viewed the human body. She points to the rapid decline and legal abolition of state-sanctioned judicial torture and public executions as proof of a new cultural reverence for individual bodily integrity. Hunt treats this as a psychological victory, where elites could no longer tolerate the sight of bodily desecration because they had learned to view the prisoner as a fellow human being.
Mearsheimer’s realism strips this development of its sentimental idealism. The state does not abandon public torture because its elites read novels and became squeamish; it abandons torture because it has optimized its internal control setup. In an anarchic world where a state must maximize its efficiency and material power to compete with foreign rivals, public torture is an inefficient, volatile tool for maintaining domestic order. It risks triggering riots, fractures elite cohesion, and wastes human capital.
The transition to regularized prison systems and bureaucratic legal codes is a process of state optimization. The state swaps spectacular, erratic violence for a highly disciplined, efficient, and totalizing system of domestic socialization and surveillance. The individual’s body is protected not because it is sacred, but because a healthy, compliant, and uniformly socialized population is the ultimate resource for a competitive state vehicle.
Hunt places immense weight on the concept of “psychological interiority”—the idea that epistolary novels taught people that inner life, private thoughts, and hidden feelings are the core of human identity. She argues that this newly discovered depth made individuals realize that every person possessed an inner self that deserved legal protection and universal rights.
Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of human preferences upends this causal model. Psychological interiority and independent self-reflection arrive late and rank last among the forces that drive human behavior. The social animal is not governed by its delicate inner thoughts, but by the intense, unreflective value infusion received during childhood socialization.
The political transformations of the late eighteenth century were not driven by citizens looking inward at their own psychological depth; they were driven by individuals looking outward and binding themselves tightly to the new, highly cohesive national group. The “inner self” Hunt chronicles is an ideological luxury product enjoyed by an literate minority. When the structural conditions of a society shift toward conflict, the complex interiority of the individual is instantly overridden by the primal, external demands of collective group solidarity.
Hunt’s historical narrative is designed to explain the origin of modern international human rights law and the rise of contemporary humanitarian NGOs, which she views as the logical continuation of the empathetic awakening that began in the Enlightenment. She treats international human rights frameworks as genuine instruments through which humanity seeks to civilize the global arena.
Mearsheimer’s The Great Delusion reveals that Hunt’s humanitarian lineage is a dangerous geopolitical illusion. The international human rights frameworks that Hunt celebrates are not the triumph of global empathy; they are the ideological standard of dominant liberal states.
When a powerful state projects its power abroad under the banner of “universal human rights” or “humanitarian intervention,” it is not acting on disinterested empathy. It is executing a standard realist strategy: attempting to remake the international system to favor its own security, manage its global reputation, and suppress rival coalitions. Hunt views human rights campaigns as a global expansion of the moral circle; Mearsheimer’s model shows they are a primary mechanism of liberal imperialism that ignores the permanent, tribal reality of human nature, inevitably producing instability and warfare rather than universal peace.
Hunt’s cultural framework struggles to explain this rapid shift from universal empathy to total state mobilization. Mearsheimer’s anthropology predicts it precisely. When the French state faced structural anarchy and existential military threats from rival European coalitions, the luxury of universalist, novel-reading empathy dissolved within seconds. The French population did not stand apart as autonomously empathetic individuals; they embedded themselves within their national survival vehicle, using intense group socialization to enforce internal conformity and maximize material power against foreign competitors. The universalist ideals of the revolution were instantly weaponized to justify imperial expansion, proving that the state vehicle always overrides the literary imagination.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof is right, Hunt’s beautiful thesis is the grandest version of the misunderstandings myth ever written. She turns a brutal, hyper-rational calculation of class interest into a story about reading fiction and catching feelings.
Hunt spent decades arguing that human rights were built on an expansion of imaginative empathy. Her thesis assumes that before the eighteenth century, elites tortured peasants or supported slavery because they suffered from a cognitive and emotional deficit—they simply lacked the narrative tools to realize that marginalized people felt pain just like them.
From Pinsof’s perspective, the aristocracy did not treat peasants like dirt because they had a failure of imagination. They did it because exploiting lower-status human beings is an effective way to secure resources, maintain leisure, and guarantee reproductive success.
The rise of human rights talk was not a sudden burst of universal love triggered by novels. It was a strategic, zero-sum coalitional maneuver. The rising bourgeoisie—the merchants, lawyers, and intellectuals—needed a weapon to smash the hereditary privileges of the nobility and the church. “Universal human rights” was the perfect ideological battering ram. It allowed a new elite to claim the moral high ground and seize control of the state apparatus.
Hunt argues that epistolary novels taught readers empathy. Pinsof’s essay reveals a much more practical function for the eighteenth-century reading boom. Mastering the reading of thick, psychologically complex novels was a supreme status signal for the emerging middle class.
If status is based on raw physical force or inherited bloodlines, the merchant and the intellectual lose. But if status is based on refinement, sensitivity, and “raised consciousness,” the reading class wins.
Spouting tears over Rousseau’s characters allowed the bourgeoisie to signal that they were morally superior to both the crude, unlettered masses and the decadent, unfeeling aristocracy. The novel was not an engine of empathy; it was a sorting device used to forge alliances among a new elite faction, allowing them to coordinate and justify their eventual capture of the state.
By tracking this history, Hunt built an immensely prestigious career, serving as president of the American Historical Association. Her work operates on the classic intellectual assumption that history is a project of expanding enlightenment, and that by studying how rights were invented, we can better protect them today.
Pinsof’s logic shows that this framework is designed for professional self-justification. If human rights are a fragile psychological invention maintained by cultural education and sophisticated reading, then society desperately needs university professors to curate, teach, and protect that heritage.
The intellectual class thrives on the myth that civilization is a delicate ecosystem kept alive by the right ideas. Hunt did not uncover a disinterested truth about human progress; she decorated the walls of our historical hole with brilliant prose about empathy, ensuring that the professional class who handles those texts remains firmly seated at the top of the cultural hierarchy.

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The Jewish Jesus and His Interpreters: Amy-Jill Levine and the Return of the New Testament to Second Temple Judaism

Posted on June 25, 2026 by Luke Ford

Amy-Jill Levine (b. 1956) is an American biblical scholar who has reshaped how readers situate Jesus, Paul, and the first followers of Jesus inside the diverse Jewish world of the Second Temple period rather than inside the categories of later Christianity. She works on the historical Jesus, the Gospels, the parables, Jewish-Christian relations, and feminist interpretation, and she ranks among the field’s leading interpreters of the New Testament. Her scholarship draws on historical criticism, literary analysis, Jewish studies, and public teaching, and it challenges centuries of Christian reading that fed antisemitism, caricatured Judaism, and obscured the Jewishness of Jesus. Few living scholars have done more to return the New Testament to its first-century Jewish setting.

Levine grew up in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, in a Jewish family set within a largely Portuguese Catholic neighborhood. She learned the textures of both traditions early. That childhood gave her a lasting question: how do two religions that share scriptures arrive at such different readings of them? She approached Christianity as a subject for historical understanding rather than as a foreign faith, and she made the relationship between Judaism and Christianity the spine of her career.

She graduated with high honors from Smith College in 1978 with majors in religion and English. She then earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in religion at Duke University, where she studied under the New Testament scholar D. Bennett Smith. The A.B. stayed an A.B. while ninety doctoral candidates passed under his hand. He printed an undergraduate essay of his in the Criterion and stayed his friend for life. D. Moody Smith or his contemporaries might have recognized the rigor. She completed her dissertation in 1984. It treated the Gospel of Matthew within its Jewish setting and appeared later as The Matthean Program of Salvation History. The historical method she worked out there shaped everything that followed.

After teaching at Swarthmore College, Levine joined Vanderbilt University in 1994. She held appointments in the Divinity School and the Department of Jewish Studies, became University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies and Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies, chaired the Faculty Senate, and grew into one of the university’s most visible public scholars. She retired in 2021 with emerita status. She then accepted the post of Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace, where she teaches now. She also holds an affiliated professorship at the Woolf Institute’s Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations at the University of Cambridge.

Levine has crossed institutional lines that few scholars cross. In the spring of 2019 she became the first Jew to teach New Testament at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, a leading Catholic center of biblical study. She has had several audiences with Pope Francis (1936-2025) and has spent decades working with Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Jewish bodies devoted to interfaith understanding. She has taught mostly in Christian seminaries and divinity schools while remaining an observant Jew. She describes herself as an unorthodox member of an Orthodox synagogue and as a Yankee Jewish feminist. She is married to Jay Geller, a scholar of modern Jewish culture, and they have two children.

The claim that organizes her scholarship is direct: one cannot understand Christianity apart from Judaism. Modern readers, she argues, project later Christian theology backward onto the New Testament and so manufacture conflict between Jesus and Judaism. Jesus did not reject Judaism or found a new religion in his lifetime. He took part in vigorous Jewish arguments over scripture, purity, law, ethics, and the coming kingdom of God. Recover that setting and the meaning of many passages changes.

Her sharpest methodological move is her critique of Judaism’s use as the Christian foil. Generations of preachers and scholars, she argues, inflated the originality of Jesus by inventing a first-century Judaism that was rigid, legalistic, misogynistic, and spiritually dead. Levine shows that much of what Jesus taught and did fell within the range of contemporary Jewish argument: healing on the Sabbath, speaking with women in public, debating Pharisees, eating with the marginal. Jesus argued inside Judaism rather than against it.

Her best-known book, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (2006), became a landmark in Jewish-Christian dialogue. Christians often misread Judaism, she argues, and Jews often misread Jesus, and both traditions gain when readers see Jesus as a first-century Jew speaking first of all to other Jews. The book now serves as a standard text in seminaries, universities, and interfaith programs.

She also rewrote how readers handle the parables. In Short Stories by Jesus (2014) she rejects the long habit of treating the parables as theological allegories where each figure stands for God, Christ, Israel, or the Church. Jesus told stories to unsettle his listeners by placing hard moral, economic, and familial choices in front of them. Her reading of the Prodigal Son shows the method. She sets aside the father as divine grace and the elder brother as legalistic Judaism, and she reads the story through inheritance, family rupture, reconciliation, and the cost of broken relations. The parable becomes an invitation to hard ethical thought rather than a charge against Judaism.

A second major contribution came with Marc Zvi Brettler, co-editing Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology or rather The Jewish Annotated New Testament, first published in 2011 and enlarged in 2017. The volume gathered Jewish scholars to annotate every book of the New Testament from Jewish historical and literary angles, and it showed that knowledge of Jewish custom, scripture, politics, and debate enriches Christian reading rather than threatens it. Levine and Brettler carried the comparative project further in The Bible With and Without Jesus (2020), which traces how Jews and Christians draw different meanings from the same texts while each stays faithful to its tradition.

Levine has done substantial work in feminist biblical scholarship as well. She grants the patriarchal assumptions of the ancient world. She also faults readings that cast Judaism as a uniquely oppressive setting for women. She warns against what she calls feminist Marcionism, naming the second-century teacher Marcion (c. 85-c. 160), who threw out the Hebrew Bible. Some Christian feminist readings, she argues, build a false contrast by presenting Jesus as the man who freed women from an unusually misogynistic Judaism. Levine shows instead that Jewish women in the Second Temple period owned property, held legal rights, ran homes, traded, and took part in religious life. The encounters of Jesus with women drew on possibilities already alive in Jewish society.

A further thread runs through her work: the ethical weight of interpretation. Biblical scholarship cannot stand apart from the consequences of its readings. Misreadings of scripture have served antisemitism, sexism, and racial prejudice. Scholars and clergy therefore carry a duty to read the text with historical care and with attention to its social effects. Historical criticism serves accuracy and reconciliation at once.

Levine writes for readers outside the academy as a matter of course. Alongside her monographs she has published accessible books that include Witness at the Cross, The Difficult Words of Jesus, Signs and Wonders, Entering the Passion of Jesus, The Gospel of Mark: A Beginner’s Guide to the Good News, The Gospel of John: A Beginner’s Guide to The Way, The Truth, and the Life, and Jesus for Everyone: Not Just Christians (2024), which distills decades of study into an account of why Jesus still speaks to Christians, Jews, secular readers, and people of other faiths. She has also produced widely used audio courses for the Teaching Company, among them surveys of the great figures of the New and Old Testaments.

Her teaching reaches children too. With Sandy Eisenberg Sasso (b. 1947) she has written Who Counts?, The Marvelous Mustard Seed, Who Is My Neighbor?, The Good for Nothing Tree, and A Very Big Problem. These retellings place the stories of Jesus in their Jewish setting and lead children toward shared ethical traditions rather than inherited stereotypes.

Levine carries weight as an editor as well. She serves as New Testament editor for the Oxford Biblical Commentary series and has edited volumes in the Wisdom Commentary series, which joins historical scholarship, feminist reading, and theological reflection. She also edited the thirteen-volume Feminist Companions to the New Testament and Early Christian Writings. Through these projects she has helped set the terms of biblical scholarship across denominational and disciplinary lines.

Her intellectual debts run to the historical-Jesus scholarship of E. P. Sanders (1937-2022), Geza Vermes (1924-2013), and James D. G. Dunn (1939-2020), whose work returned the Jewish identity of Jesus and Paul to the center of New Testament study. Levine joins that historical frame to literary criticism, feminist scholarship, Jewish studies, and interfaith work. She presses less on the doctrinal differences between Judaism and Christianity than on their shared historical ground, while she grants the theological disagreements that finally split the two traditions.

Her scholarship draws criticism from several sides. Some conservative Christian theologians hold that her stress on the Jewishness of Jesus thins out distinctive Christian doctrine. Some Jewish observers ask whether close engagement with the New Testament risks lending standing to texts long used against Jews. Levine answers that careful historical work strengthens both traditions because it trades caricature for understanding and polemic for informed talk.

Honors have followed the work. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021. She received the inaugural Seelisberg Prize in 2022, the Council of Christians and Jews Bridge Award later that year, and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation in 2023. She was elected to Academia Europaea in 2024. Her co-edited volume The Pharisees won the 2023 Biblical Archaeology Society award for the best book on the New Testament, and volumes she edited for the Wisdom Commentary series have earned Catholic Media Awards. She holds honorary doctorates from several institutions, and she has won recognition across Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, and secular communities at once.

Levine holds a singular place in biblical studies. Few scholars speak with comparable authority to Jewish audiences, Christian seminaries, Catholic institutions, and secular universities. By recovering the Jewish world of Jesus and insisting that historical accuracy carries ethical consequences, she has changed how a wide public reads the New Testament and has worked to repair one of the longest and most costly misunderstandings in Western religious history.

The Scholar in the Doorway: Amy-Jill Levine and the Many Lives of One Sacred Word

Rome, 2019. A Jewish woman from North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, stands at the lectern of the Pontifical Biblical Institute and teaches Catholic priests their own scripture. No Jew has done this in that building before her. The seminarians take notes in the cool marble light. She walks them back into the first century, into a Galilee of small farms, debt, purity law, and argument, and she shows them a Jesus who reasons like a Jew because he is one. She does this without converting. She does it without apology. She keeps her seat at Congregation Sherith Israel in Nashville and flies home to it.

The word that organizes her life is context.

A hero system, in the account of Ernest Becker (1924-1974), is the scheme of significance a culture hands a person so that he might feel he outlasts his own death. The scheme tells him what counts as a life worth having lived. It gives him a way to earn a sense of cosmic value and to deny, for a while, that he is an animal who dies. Each culture writes its own scheme. Each subculture inside a culture writes a finer one. Amy-Jill Levine (b. 1956) builds her scheme out of scholarship, and the coin of that scheme, the thing she spends and defends and will not let others counterfeit, is context.

For Levine context carries weight that a layman cannot feel. She reads the New Testament as a Jew, and the New Testament supplied the theological engine for two thousand years of harm to Jews. The charge of deicide, the contrast between a vengeful Hebrew God and a loving Christian one, the Pharisee as hypocrite, the Jew as legalist with a dead religion: each of these grows from a verse read out of its first-century home. Levine’s claim, worked out across The Misunderstood Jew and a shelf of books after it, is that the harm rides on the misreading, and that accurate reading takes the harm away. Put the man back among his own people and he stops being the club used to beat them. So context, for her, holds off a doubled death. It guards against her own grave, as every hero system does, and it guards against the grave dug for her people by a sentence read wrong.

That is the heart of her scheme. To grasp it, watch what the same word does inside other men’s schemes, because context is a fighting word, and it carries different cargo into every life that uses it.

Consider the homicide detective in the interview room at two in the morning, styrofoam cup going cold, a folder of crime-scene photographs squared on the steel table. For him context is the chain that turns a body into a case. He wants the before. The debt, the affair, the slammed door, the text message sent at 11:40. “Nobody just kills,” he says. “There’s always a before, and the before is where I live.” Supply enough context and the killing convicts. Strip it away and the killing is noise. His scheme of significance runs on the clearance rate, on the dead getting their names spoken aloud in a courtroom, on the case that closes and stays closed after he retires. Context, for him, builds the case.

Down the hall, in a different year, a defense attorney uses the same word to break a case apart. She stands in front of twelve jurors and holds up one damning sentence her client said. Then she gives them the hour before it, the provocation, the fear, the misheard threat. “My client’s words were taken out of context,” she says, and she means it as the lever that frees a man. Two officers of the same courthouse, one sacred word, opposite ends of it. The detective gathers context to convict. The attorney invokes it to acquit. Each believes the word belongs to him.

Now leave the courthouse for a storefront church on a Sunday night, folding chairs, a drum kit, a preacher in a good suit who came up out of a hard life and reads the verse as a living word spoken to the room right now. To him the scholar’s context is a threat. When the educated man says, “In the first century a listener would have heard this as,” the preacher hears the oldest question in the book, the serpent’s question in the garden, did God really say. Context, in his ear, is what the clever use to take the fire out of the Word. His scheme places eternity in the present tense. The Spirit falls tonight. The altar call comes tonight. A verse that needs a footnote from a professor has already lost its power to save. He does not want the first century. He wants the burning now.

Then there is the comic at the late show, second set, half the room drunk. For him context is the death of the joke. The bit has to travel. It has to land cold, in a club he has never played, on a crowd that knows nothing about him. “If I have to explain it,” he says, “it’s already dead.” His small immortality is the line that needs no setup, the bit that gets stolen because it works anywhere, the laugh that outlives the night. Levine spends her career doing the one thing he fears most. She supplies the footnote that brings a dead line back to life. He guards immediacy. She restores the lost frame. The same word stands at the center of both their lives and points in opposite directions.

The sharpest case sits closest to Levine. Picture a yeshiva student bent over a folio of Talmud, the verse in the center of the page, Rashi down one margin, Tosafot down the other, the commentaries of a thousand years stacked around the text like a city built up over its own ruins. Ask him whether context governs his reading and he will look at you as if you asked whether water is wet. Of course. The verse means what the chain of tradition says it means. He reads down through time, through Rashi and the Gemara and the responsa, each generation handing the reading to the next. His context descends. His scheme of significance places his own name as one more link in that chain, the Torah outliving every reader who ever held it, the transmission unbroken because men like him refuse to break it.

Levine is a Jew too, observant, at home in a synagogue. Her context goes the other way. She reads sideways into the first century, into the world standing around the text at the moment it was written, the Roman tax, the Pharisaic argument, the village economy, the place of women who owned property and ran homes. His context goes down through the generations. Hers goes out into the lost moment. Both are Jews. Both call the word sacred. Neither recognizes the other’s word. The yeshiva student fears that her horizontal reading cuts the verse loose from the chain. Levine answers that the chain itself sits inside a history, and that the history can be recovered, and that recovering it honors the text rather than dishonoring it. Two schemes, one tribe, one word, and a quiet argument between them that has run since the Enlightenment opened the question.

Set all of these beside Levine and her own sense of the word comes clear by contrast. Context, for her, brings a man home. She takes a first-century Jew who has spent two thousand years dressed in the robes of the religion that persecuted her people, and she returns him to his table, his Sabbath, his arguments with other Jews about purity and law and the kingdom of God. The work is repair. It is the nearest thing her tradition allows her to call resurrection. Not the body raised from the tomb, which she leaves to the Christians, but the man restored to his world, and the world restored to the reading of him.

This is why the foil holds such terror for her. In sermon after sermon, century after century, preachers needed a dark Judaism to make Jesus shine. The Jew became the background, the legalist, the hypocrite, the shadow against which the light stood out. To be the foil is the death her scheme fights, the symbolic erasure where a whole people exists only to set off another people’s hero. Her answer is to step out of the background and become a reader of the text that cast her there. She annotates it. She edits it. She teaches it in Rome. She makes the foil into an authority on the very book that painted her as shadow.

She names her own position better than anyone else has. She calls herself an unorthodox member of an Orthodox synagogue. She lives in the doorway. She does her life’s work inside a Christian cathedral and reads it as a Jew, and she refuses the comfort of either room. She will not dissolve into the church’s scholarship and become one more Christian voice on the New Testament. She will not retreat into a Judaism that leaves the New Testament to its worst readers and pretends the text has nothing to do with her. The doorway looks like a weak place to stand. Becker says a hero system needs solid ground under it, a platform from which a person can feel significant and durable. Levine builds her platform on the threshold, and the courage of it is that she never steps all the way into either room.

Her afterlife is the one she will admit to wanting. Not the resurrection of the body. The conversation. The seminar that runs after she has left it, the annotated edition that outlives its editors, the priest in Rome who now reads the Sermon on the Mount and hears a rabbi pressing an argument rather than a founder launching a church. The Jewish Annotated New Testament sits on the desks of preachers who will never meet her and will preach a little differently because of it. A reading, once corrected, is hard to un-correct. That is the immortality she can believe in, and context is the work by which she earns it.

In the room in Rome the priests close their notebooks. The first Jew to teach New Testament in that building has changed, by a degree, how the next generation of priests will preach. A sermon preached with the first century in it is a sermon that no longer needs the Jew for a shadow. For Levine that is not a footnote. It is a death held off, one reading at a time.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology provides a structural reinterpretation of Amy-Jill Levine. It validates her mapping of first-century sectarian struggles while completely dismantling her modern project of interfaith reconciliation through critical reason.
Levine is famous for reading the New Testament through a first-century Jewish lens. In books like The Misunderstood Jew (2006), she argues that Jesus must be understood within his native Jewish environment, framing early Christian disputes as internal family arguments rather than a fundamental break from Judaism. She champions historical-critical education to eliminate anti-Semitic misreadings and foster interfaith empathy.
Mearsheimer’s realism cuts through Levine’s framework on several fronts.
Levine shows that Jesus operated entirely within first-century Judaism, debating the Pharisees and Sadducees over the correct interpretation of the law.
Mearsheimer’s framework treats this historical arena as a classic setup of sub-coalition competition under imperial occupation. The factions Levine profiles were not engaging in detached theological debates. They were competing groups optimizing different survival strategies under the shadow of Roman power. The Sadducees cooperated with the empire to protect their institutional status; the Pharisees focused on internal purity to keep the tribe distinct; the Zealots pursued military resistance. The Jesus movement emerged as another rival sub-coalition competing for resources, authority, and loyal followers within a fractured, anarchic territory. Levine’s contextualization is accurate, but she describes a raw struggle for factional dominance.
Levine treats the subsequent split between Judaism and Christianity as a tragic historical misunderstanding fueled by downstream political polemics. She argues that the text was weaponized later, distorting the original proximity of the two groups
.Mearsheimer’s realism strips this narrative of its historical regret, explaining the split through the logic of coalition displacement. To survive and scale up within the anarchic Roman Empire, the early Christian sub-coalition had to execute a standard tribal migration. It needed to shed its local, parochial restrictions like circumcision and dietary laws to attract a broader population. The sharp anti-Jewish rhetoric in later gospels was not an intellectual error or a misunderstanding. It was the ideological standard required to police the new group’s boundaries, signal a definitive break from the old parent structure, and enforce total compliance among its members during an intense competition for survival.
Levine spends her career promoting interfaith dialogue, trusting that historical education can strip away centuries of prejudice. She believes that if people use their reason to understand the shared roots of the text, mutual empathy will replace ancient hostility.
In Short Stories by Jesus, Levine argues that the parables were designed to disrupt comfortable assumptions and force individual listeners into intense psychological self-examination. She views these stories as instruments of ethical subversion that challenge the status quo by bypassing group prejudices. Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of human preferences rejects this focus on individual introspection. Human beings do not navigate the world through detached self-reflection. They look to narrative to find the boundaries and rules of their immediate group. The parables did not survive because they prompted abstract self-correction. They survived because the early Christian coalition used them to codify a new internal code, regulate member behavior, and enforce discipline against external rivals. What Levine reads as an invitation to individual enlightenment functions structurally as the moral logic used to bind a new tribe together.
This upends Levine’s broader historical project, which seeks to uncover a pure, first-century Jewish Jesus separate from the later dogmas of the Christian church. She treats the downstream transformation of Jesus into a gentile icon as a historical distortion that can be corrected through accurate scholarship. Mearsheimer’s realism implies that the actual historical details of a founder matter far less than the narrative construction the surviving coalition requires. A group facing intense competition under conditions of anarchy must fashion its foundational hero to maximize collective power and ensure survival. The church did not distort Jesus through a reading error or a lack of historical data. The church transformed his image into a sovereign, non-Jewish symbol to protect its institutional alignment, police its borders, and eventually capture the apparatus of the Roman Empire. Levine’s attempt to peel back these theological layers to find a historical neighbor ignores the fact that groups require totalizing myths, not precise biography, to maintain cohesion.
Levine’s work inside elite universities and divinity schools relies on the assumption that shared text-critical study can create a post-sectarian space where ancient hostilities dissolve. Mearsheimer views this academic harmony as a standard elite illusion. The interfaith salon remains peaceful only because a dominant state secures the perimeter, maintains material abundance, and dampens local competition. The shared seminar is a luxury product of high security. The moment structural conditions deteriorate or real resource scarcity threatens the community, this thin, rational consensus breaks down. The social animal drops the nuanced, historical-critical perspectives cultivated by academic elites and returns to the primary, unreflective group identity infused during childhood. Levine treats theological prejudice as a correctable educational problem, but realism shows it is the permanent defense setup of a species designed for group competition.
Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of human preferences places independent reason last, far behind the unreflective survival instincts of the group and early socialization. The long human childhood ensures that families and cohesive religious communities impose an intense value infusion on individuals before critical faculties mature. Primal group loyalties and theological defense mechanisms are fixed by this early conditioning. A text-critical analysis cannot dissolve centuries of group hostility because those prejudices serve as structural boundaries to protect the identity of the tribe. Levine treats theological bias as a correctable reading error, but realism shows it is the protective armor of a competing coalition.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof is right, Levine’s entire professional output is literally named after the very myth he is exposing. Her work treats deep-seated intergroup hostility as a correctable clerical error rather than a rational feature of coalitional warfare.
Levine spent decades showing that Jesus operated entirely within the boundaries of second-temple Judaism, keeping kosher, wearing fringes, and debating Torah like a standard rabbi. She argues that when the early Church and modern pastors paint Judaism as a toxic foil for Jesus, they do so out of a lack of historical awareness or an over-reliance on biased theological traditions.
From Pinsof’s perspective, the early Church fathers did not isolate Jesus from his Jewish context because they had a senior moment or lacked adequate historical source material. They did it because they were locked in a zero-sum competition over religious legitimacy, social status, and eventual control over the coercive apparatus of the Roman Empire.
To win a high-stakes competition, you do not write an accurate, nuanced sociological profile of your rival; you fight dirty, you demonize the competition, and you maximize the difference between your side and theirs. The caricature of the “legalistic Jew” was not a misunderstanding; it was a highly effective rhetorical weapon used to conquer the Western mind.
Levine is a major advocate for interfaith dialogue, frequently lecturing at churches, synagogues, and universities to clear up misconceptions. She operates on the classic intellectual assumption that if people simply realize their religious neighbors are normal, decent human beings with shared historical roots, bigotry will dissolve.
Pinsof’s logic reveals that these dialogue spaces serve a very different, self-serving class function. The public does not split into hostile religious or political coalitions out of ignorance; they do so to protect their immediate group interests, family arrangements, and local authority.
The interfaith dialogue model is a luxury product designed by and for the credentialed intelligentsia. By framing intense, historical rivalries as “conceptual tangles” that can be smoothed over by a brilliant lecture or a co-edited textbook, Levine creates an exclusive market where the academic is the essential mediator. The intervention does not change the Darwinian logic of the groups on the ground, but it successfully extracts status and prestige for the professors who manage the conversation.
Levine co-edited The Jewish Annotated New Testament, providing a dense, scholarly apparatus to help Christians read their own scriptures through a baseline Jewish lens. The implicit promise of the text is that historical precision leads to moral and communal enlightenment.
If Pinsof is right, this massive editorial project is an alliance-building device and a tool for professional monopoly. By establishing that a Christian cannot truly understand the Gospels without an academic guide who specializes in first-century Jewish contextual analysis, Levine renders traditional, unlettered faith obsolete.
It turns a popular, visceral religious text into an academic asset that requires university credentials to unlock. Levine did not discover that the centuries of conflict were a big mistake; she built an elegant, highly sophisticated lens to examine the historical hole, ensuring that the scholar who handles the footnotes remains seated at the absolute top of the cultural hierarchy.

Posted in Amy Jill-Levine, Bible | Comments Off

The Keeper of the Dead: Timothy Snyder’s Hero System

Posted on June 25, 2026 by Luke Ford

On March 14, 2023, the Russian delegation calls the United Nations Security Council into session to discuss Russophobia. The Russians want the floor to argue that the world hates Russians and that the hatred explains the resistance Russia meets in Ukraine. Into the chamber they invite, by way of video link, an American historian, and the choice turns against them within minutes. Timothy Snyder (b. 1969) tells the council that the word Russophobia serves Moscow as cover for crimes Moscow commits. The harm done to Russian life and Russian culture, he says, comes first from the Kremlin. Vasily Nebenzya, the Russian ambassador, demands sources. Snyder names one. He points to the Russian president, who has said in print that Ukraine has no right to exist.

The scene holds the man in miniature. A historian of Eastern Europe, fluent in the reading of ten languages, sits in the seat reserved for witnesses against power and treats a forum that great states use for theater as a place to enter a fact into the record. He came prepared to be the keeper of an accounting. That posture, held across thirty years and sixteen books, makes Snyder a clean case for Ernest Becker (1924-1974), whose work gives us the term and the tool.

Becker’s argument runs simple and dark. Man knows he dies, and the knowledge sits under everything he builds. To live with the terror he constructs a hero system, a scheme of cosmic significance that lets him feel his days count toward something the grave cannot reach. The system might be a religion, a nation, a science, a family line, a body of work. Inside it a man earns the sense that he is more than meat. The sacred values of any culture mark the routes by which its members reach for that significance. A value names a door. Through the door lies the feeling that one’s life has weight in the order of things.

Snyder’s sacred word is freedom. He wrote a book with that title in 2024, and he built much of his public voice on the claim that Americans have the word wrong. The wager is worth stating plainly, because the word does more work in more mouths than almost any other, and because Snyder’s own life shows the word migrating before it ever leaves him.

He started somewhere else with it. As a high school student in suburban Ohio, son of a veterinarian and a Quaker schoolteacher, Snyder held libertarian views and read in that key. The title of his 2018 book, The Road to Unfreedom, answers Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) and his The Road to Serfdom, and the answer reverses the teacher. For the young Hayekian, freedom means the absence of the state, the clearing of ground, the door held open and no one in it. For the mature Snyder, freedom means the opposite arrangement. A man becomes free only inside a thick weave of institutions, neighbors, courts, schools, and roads, the supports that let him become someone in the first place. Freedom-from gives way to freedom-to. The word stays. The meaning flips inside one life. Becker’s point arrives before we reach a second man: the sacred term holds a different cosmos at twenty than it holds at fifty, and each cosmos feels to its holder like the obvious shape of the world.

Now set Snyder’s freedom beside the others, the men who say the same word and reach through different doors.

A Ukrainian conscript stands in a trench east of the Dnipro with mud to the boot-top and a drone somewhere overhead he cannot see. Ask him about freedom and he does not reach for institutions or for the open clearing. Freedom for him means the simple continued existence of the thing his grandmother spoke, the right of a people to keep its name on the map and its dead in its own ground. His hero system runs through soil and language and the line of the border. He earns his significance by holding a position so that a town behind him stays a town. The word in his mouth weighs as much as Snyder’s and points the other way, toward the nation as the body that outlives the man, the oldest immortality there is.

A reader of Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954) sits in a Moscow apartment with the television low and a sense that the West has rotted from the inside. For him freedom arrives through surrender. The free man dissolves his small self into the great organic body of Russia, lays down the burden of choosing, and finds rest in obedience to a destiny larger than any vote. Western liberty looks to him like a sickness, a freedom to come apart. His door opens onto submission, and through it he reaches a redemption the soldier in the trench treats as the enemy of everything he guards. Both men say freedom. Each hears in the other man’s freedom a kind of death.

In a glass office south of San Francisco a founder of three companies talks about exit. Freedom for him means the right to leave, to route around the slow institutions, to build a network and a charter city and a private order faster than any legislature can move. He admires the sovereign individual. He treats the courts and schools and roads that Snyder calls the supports of freedom as legacy weight, friction, the past charging rent on the future. His hero system runs on acceleration and on the founder as a small god of his own platform. He and the mature Snyder use the one word to name two opposed cosmologies, and neither can grant the other the term without surrendering his own claim to significance.

A Communist Party cadre in Chengdu files a report and thinks the question of freedom settled long ago and settled the right way. For him freedom means order, the end of the century of humiliation, the lifting of eight hundred million men out of want, a people that rises together and does not splinter. Chaos is the true unfreedom. The Western argument about freedom-from strikes him as a luxury of nations that have forgotten famine. His door opens onto the collective ascent, and his significance comes from his place in a machine that has done what no machine before it has done at that scale. He says freedom and means the floor under a billion feet.

In Borough Park a Hasid walks to shul before dawn with his coat buttoned against the cold, and for him the free man is the one bound. Freedom comes through the yoke of the commandments, through service, through a discipline that frees him from the tyranny of his own appetites and from the noise of the street. The Talmud teaches that no man is free except the one who labors in Torah. His door opens by closing, his significance comes from a covenant older than any state, and the freedom of the San Francisco founder looks to him like a man drowning who calls the water liberty.

Five men, one word, five cosmoses, and each cosmos supplies the man inside it with the feeling that his life reaches past his death. This is the heart of what Snyder’s career studies and the heart of what Snyder’s career enacts, and the doubling is where the standard reading stops and the harder one begins.

Snyder is not only a man with a hero system. He is the rare subject who has spent his working life mapping hero systems gone murderous. Bloodlands, published in 2010, sets out a single fact the field had let scatter into separate national histories. In the lands between Berlin and Moscow, between 1933 and 1945, the policies of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) and Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) killed some fourteen million civilians who were not soldiers and not casualties of battle. Snyder gathers the famine and the Terror and the Holocaust and the German reprisals into one ground and asks how the killing happened there, in that space, in that span. Black Earth, from 2015, presses the Holocaust toward the present as a warning. On Tyranny, from 2017, takes the lessons of the century and writes them as instructions for Americans, among them the line about anticipatory obedience, the man who bends before the order arrives.

What he documents, again and again, is the immortality project turned into an engine of corpses. Hitler offers racial rebirth, a thousand-year body for the German to disappear into and thereby never die. Stalin offers the redeemed future, the worker’s heaven that justifies any present cost because the cost buys eternity. Putin’s circle offers, through Ilyin, the innocent organic Russia that can do no wrong because it stands outside ordinary time. Each promises the terrified man a way past his own grave. Each pays for the promise with other men’s graves. Snyder has read the receipts.

So he knows the danger of the redemptive story better than almost any living writer. He knows that the warm feeling of significance, the door that opens onto the cosmos, has stood at the entrance of the worst rooms of the modern age. And then he builds his own.

His runs through memory. The historian, on Snyder’s practice, stands against oblivion by keeping the dead present and naming the lie while it is still small. He coins terms and sends them into American speech, the big lie, the memory laws, the order to refuse obedience in advance. He moves from Yale to the Munk School at Toronto under a chair funded by Ukrainian-Canadian money. He briefs Congress on political warfare. He raises a million and a quarter dollars for Ukrainian air defense and launches a mine-clearing fund beside Mark Hamill (b. 1951), so that a historian of the bloodlands and the man who played Luke Skywalker stand together asking strangers to pay for robots that pull explosives out of farm soil. He sits two hours with Volodymyr Zelensky (b. 1978). Henry Kissinger (1923-2023) blurbs his books and the Russians put him on a list of Americans barred from their territory. The status world is the transnational liberal one, Davos and the Council on Foreign Relations and the Holocaust museum’s Committee on Conscience, and Snyder moves through it as a man whose work is to make the dead count and to keep the record from being burned.

Here is the door he reaches through. The honest accounting. When he tells the executive branch that truth never sits with those who hold power, he states the creed of his system in one breath. Significance, for Snyder, comes from standing where the powerful want no witness and writing down what happened. The historian denies his own death by becoming the keeper of everyone else’s, by refusing to let fourteen million be rounded down or explained away, by entering one more fact into the record at the Security Council while a great state runs its theater above him.

The reflexive turn is the new ground worth walking. Snyder runs a hero system whose content is the study of hero systems that kill. He has, in effect, theorized the loaded weapon and then picked it up and aimed it, and the question the essay can set down without answering is whether his aim is different in kind or only in direction. His wager holds that there are two sorts of system, the kind that manufactures the dead to feed the living a story of rebirth, and the kind that counts the dead honestly and so refuses the story its fuel. The first kind needs the lie. The second kind needs the fact. On that distinction he stakes his life’s weight, and on that distinction Ukraine becomes for him the front line of freedom and not one more border war, because the men in the trench are holding the door of the honest accounting against the men who say a nation has no right to its own name.

A reader inside any of the five other cosmoses can answer that the distinction is itself a move in Snyder’s system, that the liberal order counts its own dead and forgets the dead it makes, that the keeper of the record is also a man reaching past his grave and dressing the reach in the language of fact. Becker leaves that door open. He does not tell us which immortality project earns its significance and which only borrows it. He tells us that every man builds one, that the building runs deeper than argument, and that the man who can name the impulse in others carries it himself into the naming.

Snyder carries it well. He came up libertarian and grew into the theorist of positive liberty. He spent his youth among the documents of mass death and made of that study a vocation that puts him in trenches by proxy and in council chambers by link. He treats the past as a stock of things that happened and were not foreseen, and he reasons from that stock to the intuition that something unforeseen is happening now and that a trained eye might catch it. The eye is real. The training is real. The accounting is the work of a serious man.

The dead, in his hands, get counted. Whether the counting buys him what every hero system promises its keeper, a place in the order of things that the grave cannot reach, is the one fact he cannot enter into the record, because that record is written by the men who come after, and they will build their own systems, and reach through their own doors, and mean by his sacred word whatever their own terror requires.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology completely demolishes the historical framework, political warnings, and strategic advocacy of Timothy Snyder.
The intellectual clash between Mearsheimer and Snyder represents the deepest rift in modern foreign policy, pitting structural realism against liberal institutionalism and moral history.
Snyder is highly influential for historical works like Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010) and Black Earth (2015), as well as his contemporary political tracts On Tyranny (2017) and The Road to Unfreedom (2018). He operates on the premise that history is governed by human choices, ideas, and moral willpower. He views the rise of authoritarianism, imperialism, and the erosion of democracy not as structural necessities, but as ideological failures and deliberate psychological manipulations that individuals can resist through conscious moral agency.
Mearsheimer’s realism undercuts Snyder’s entire corpus in several profound ways.
In The Road to Unfreedom and his public commentary regarding Russia and Ukraine, Snyder attributes geopolitical aggression largely to the toxic power of ideas—specifically what he calls the “politics of eternity” (fascistic, unhistorical myth-making used by autocrats to freeze time and justify conquest). For Snyder, the war in Ukraine and Russian expansionism are driven by Vladimir Putin’s ideological commitment to a mystical, imperialist vision of Russian destiny.
If Mearsheimer is right, Snyder’s focus on ideology is a complete misdiagnosis that mistakes the cosmetic justification for the underlying cause. States do not project power or invade neighbors because they are possessed by bad philosophical ideas; they do so because they operate in an anarchic international system where survival requires maximizing security and preventing rival military alliances from encroaching on their borders. What Snyder reads as a unique, fascistic pathology of the Russian state is the standard, predictable behavior of a regional power reacting to a perceived existential threat—specifically the expansion of a hostile military alliance (NATO) into its immediate sphere of influence. Realism implies that any Russian leader, regardless of his domestic ideology, might respond aggressively to the same structural pressure.
In On Tyranny, Snyder offers twenty lessons from the twentieth century, arguing that individuals can defend democratic institutions against tyranny through personal acts of courage, critical thinking, and a refusal to obey instructions blindly. He treats the individual conscience as a formidable barrier against state optimization.
Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of human preferences destroys this voluntaristic optimism. Reason and independent individual critique arrive late and rank last among the forces that govern human behavior, falling far behind the unreflective survival instincts of the group. The intense value infusion a person receives during a long childhood socialization wires the brain for group loyalty and obedience long before he ever encounters political theory. When a state mobilizes for systemic conflict or faces a crisis, the individual does not stand apart as an autonomous moral actor. He embeds himself within his survival group. Snyder’s belief that decentralized individual choices can stall the momentum of state survival vehicles overestimates the power of independent reason.
Snyder’s public advocacy rests on the liberal assumption that the expansion of democratic values, European integration, and global human rights frameworks creates a more peaceful and stable world order. He views international law and institutions as valid instruments that can tame regional competition.
In Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Snyder offers a highly influential thesis: the Holocaust occurred with the greatest speed and intensity not where the Nazi state was strongest, but precisely where the Nazi and Soviet regimes had systematically destroyed the pre-existing state structures of Central and Eastern Europe. Snyder argues that the elimination of legal states creates a zone of absolute lawlessness where human nature is decoupled from institutional morality, allowing mass murder to proceed unchecked. He presents the state as a moral container for human choices.
Mearsheimer’s realism strips this thesis of its institutional idealism. The state is not a moral container that elevates human behavior; it is a structural vehicle for group survival. When a state structure is destroyed, the human animal does not enter a vacuum of abstract ethical choices. Instead, individuals are instantly thrown back into a state of raw, local anarchy where their immediate survival depends entirely on intense, unreflective group solidarity.
The horrific violence Snyder documents in the destroyed zones was not caused by a failure of individuals to make the correct ethical choices in the absence of a legal state. It was the predictable behavior of competing groups fighting for survival under conditions of extreme scarcity and physical threat. By treating the state as a moral stabilizer rather than a power apparatus, Snyder misinterprets the structural violence of anarchy as a failure of institutional ethics.
A central pillar of Snyder’s political activism, particularly in On Tyranny, is his defense of objective truth and what he calls “factuality.” He argues that post-truth politics—the deliberate propagation of lies and alternative realities by autocrats—is a targeted psychological attack designed to erode individual reason and make citizens passive accomplices to tyranny. Snyder demands that individuals commit to investigative journalism and hard facts as a form of political resistance.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology, paired with alliance theory, reveals that Snyder’s focus on objective truth misapprehends the primary function of political communication. Human language did not evolve as a tool for detached, scientific truth-telling; it evolved as a device to coordinate behavior, enforce internal conformity, and manage reputations within a coalition.
What Snyder categorizes as a pathological “post-truth” strategy is the standard operating setup of any tribal coalition engaged in intense external competition. The ideological standard or political myth a group adopts is not designed to pass a fact-check; it is designed to signal group loyalty and mobilize collective power. By assuming that a democratic population can be organized and defended through a pure commitment to abstract factuality, Snyder relies on a faculty—independent reason—that Mearsheimer’s hierarchy places last among human motivations.
In The Road to Unfreedom, Snyder diagnoses modern political decay through two competing frameworks: the “politics of inevitability” (the naive liberal belief that the future will naturally bring more freedom and democracy) and the “politics of eternity” (the fascist belief that a nation is trapped in a cyclical, heroic struggle against permanent external enemies). Snyder treats both frameworks as psychological traps that individual critical thinking can dismantle.
Mearsheimer’s realism reveals that Snyder has merely invented two sophisticated psychological labels for the standard rhetorical shifts of the social animal.
The “politics of inevitability” is the ideological mask used by a dominant, un-threatened liberal coalition during a rare period of total global hegemony.
The “politics of eternity” is the predictable rhetorical shift that occurs when that hegemony begins to fracture and groups must re-mobilize their populations for intense geopolitical competition.
The cycle Snyder describes is not a battle of historical philosophies in the human mind; it is the cultural reflection of changing material and structural conditions in an anarchic world. A population does not succumb to the “politics of eternity” because it was hypnotized by bad philosophers; it returns to traditional tribal narratives because those narratives match the hard reality of group competition for survival.
Mearsheimer’s The Great Delusion explains that this liberal universalism is an anthropological fantasy that inevitably produces instability. Because humans are tribal animals whose primary allegiance is to their distinct national security vehicles, any attempt by Western liberal elites to export their political structures or expand their ideological sphere of influence into the territory of rival groups will trigger an intense defensive reaction. Snyder views the promotion of Western integration in Eastern Europe as a neutral, moral good; Mearsheimer’s model shows it is a dangerous geopolitical provocation that ignores the unyielding realities of group competition, ultimately causing the catastrophic destruction of the very borderland nations Snyder seeks to protect.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof is right, Snyder’s entire career operates as a premier manufacturer of the misunderstandings myth. His work transforms brutal, zero-sum coalitional warfare into a series of correctable historical lessons, positioning the Yale historian as an essential national security asset.
In On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Snyder provides behavioral rules for citizens to resist authoritarianism, such as “defend institutions,” “believe in truth,” and “be as courageous as you can.” He frames the rise of populist and authoritarian movements as a moral and intellectual lapse—a moment where citizens are tricked by demagogues because they forgot how Hitler or Stalin came to power.
Pinsof might say that populist movements do not emerge because voters skipped history class. They emerge because a specific coalition of citizens feels economically, culturally, or politically marginalized by the existing elite and decides to launch a hostile raid on the state apparatus.
Snyder’s handbook is not a tool for universal liberation; it is a defensive manual for his own high-status class. When Snyder implores citizens to “defend institutions” and “trust professional journalists,” he is explicitly defending the gatekeepers who secure his own social authority. By framing the political opposition as an irrational, misinformed mob that lacks historical literacy, Snyder avoids acknowledging their actual, rational grievance. It turns a raw turf war over who runs the country into a psychiatric intervention where the Yale professor holds the prescription pad.
Snyder frequently writes about the danger of post-truth politics, arguing that authoritarians use firehoses of falsehoods to confuse the public and erode their capacity for shared reality. In his framework, the primary battle line of modern politics is between those who respect objective facts and those who are infected by state-sponsored misinformation.
Pinsof might say that political actors do not spread or consume propaganda because they have a cognitive bias or because they misunderstand reality. They do it because denial, embellishment, and selective facts are highly effective weapons in a zero-sum fight for power.
By framing political conflict as a war over “facts,” Snyder pulls a classic intellectual maneuver. If politics is about competing resource interests, the historian has no special authority. But if politics is a test of factual accuracy and historical interpretation, then the Yale history department becomes the supreme court of civic life. The focus on “misinformation” is a moral panic that allows intellectuals to dismiss their political rivals’ platforms as a mental glitch, justifying the censorship or marginalization of opposing views under the banner of defending truth.
In Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Snyder meticulously charted the mass murder of 14 million people in the zone between Germany and Russia. He analyzed the bureaucratic and ideological engines that enabled both regimes to execute such unprecedented slaughter, treating the tragedy as an ultimate warning about where ideological fanaticism and dehumanization lead.
Pinsof might say that the terrifying efficiency of Nazi and Soviet violence was not a breakdown of human reason or a failure of empathy. It was a hyper-rational, Darwinian deployment of force by two massive coalitions competing for absolute territorial and resource dominance. The actors involved understood exactly what they were doing: they were eliminating potential rivals, securing living space, and using state terror to guarantee their own survival and supremacy.
Snyder takes this raw, terrifying display of human competitive logic and transforms it into a highly valuable academic commodity. By positioning himself as the definitive chronicler of this historical hole, he accumulates immense cultural and institutional capital. He did not write Bloodlands to change human nature—which remains exactly as natural selection designed it—but to establish a professional monopoly over the interpretation of political evil, ensuring his own continuous seats at global forums and elite advisory boards.

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How Wide the We: David Hollinger and the Quarrel Over Solidarity

Posted on June 25, 2026 by Luke Ford

David Hollinger (b. April 25, 1941) keeps an office on a hill above the Bay, and the hill matters to the story even now that he has retired from it. Berkeley sits in the line of sight of the whole Pacific world. The historian who spent his life arguing that Americans should widen the circle of the people they count as their own picked a campus that faces the widest ocean and the most foreign shore. He earned his doctorate there in 1970, returned as the Preston Hotchkis Professor in 1992, and stepped down in 2013 with eight books behind him and the title emeritus in front of his name. The books carry the argument of a single life. Postethnic America. Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity. After Cloven Tongues of Fire. Protestants Abroad. Christianity’s American Fate. A reader who lines the spines up on a shelf reads one long sentence about belonging, written across four decades, by a man who wanted the human “we” to grow until it had no edge.

He came to that wish from a pulpit. His father preached. His grandfather preached. His great-grandfather preached. Four generations of Church of the Brethren ministers stood in front of congregations of plain people and told them what a life was for, and the fourth generation produced a son who walked out of the church and into the seminar room and never came back to the faith. He has called himself an atheist for most of his adult life. He wrote a memoir of the family and the leaving of it and gave the book a title taken from a Brethren hymn: When This Mask of Flesh is Broken. That is the detail to hold. The man who left the church narrates his departure from inside the cadence of the church. He reaches for the hymn his ancestors sang over their dead to name the book about no longer believing the hymn. The faith you reject is the one that teaches you what a life story sounds like.

Ernest Becker (1924–1974) gives us the frame to read this. A man, Becker argued, knows he will die and cannot bear the knowing, and so he builds a hero system, a structure of symbols that lets him feel his life counts against oblivion. The hero system tells him what heroism is, what a contribution looks like, how a name outlasts a body. Every culture is such a structure. The Brethren offered one shape of it: a saved soul, a plain life, a congregation that buries you in the assurance of resurrection. Hollinger declined that shape and built another in its place. The pulpit became the lectern. The sermon became the monograph. The congregation became the seminar and then the readership. The soul to be saved became the argument to be advanced, the citation that would carry his name forward into a conversation he hoped had no end. Becker would say the form of heroism stayed while the creed flipped. The Brethren minister and the Berkeley professor are the same animal denying the same death by different doctrines.

The doctrine Hollinger built has a sacred word at its center, and the word is solidarity.

He spent a book on it. He paired it with cosmopolitanism and asked how a man holds both: the reach toward all of humanity and the bond with the few who are his. For Hollinger solidarity means the readiness to share a fate with people you did not choose by blood, the willingness to count strangers as kin because you have reasoned your way to the wider circle rather than inherited the narrow one. His solidarity is voluntary, revisable, postethnic. You affiliate. You can re-affiliate. The “we” you belong to is the one you keep choosing, not the one your grandmother handed you in the cradle. He drew the line from Randolph Bourne (1886–1918), who imagined a trans-national America before the First World War killed him, and from William James (1842–1910), who taught that ideas earn their truth in use. The circle widens by argument and by choice. That is the heaven of the secular cosmopolitan. A future in which the we has grown to hold everyone, and a man’s name attaches to having pushed the edge of it outward.

Hold that meaning of the word steady, and then carry the same word into other rooms, because the trouble Becker exposes is that the word is sacred to people who mean nothing alike by it.

In a shipyard in Gdańsk, solidarity wears a different face. A welder there in the early eighties wore the word on a banner over a strike, and behind the banner stood the Black Madonna and a Polish pope and a nation that had buried its faith and dug it back up under an atheist state. Ask that man what solidarity means and he points to the union card and the rosary in the same gesture. The we is the baptized nation. The bond is descent and faith fused into one thing, and the enemy who taught him the word, the Party, used it to mean the brotherhood of all workers everywhere, the wide circle with no edge. He spat that version out. To the welder the cosmopolitan solidarity is the acid the commissars poured on the nation to dissolve it. “They told us we were brothers with the whole world,” he might say, wiping his hands, “so that we would forget we were Poles.” His solidarity needs an edge. It is solid because it stops somewhere.

Cross to a storefront church in Memphis on a Sunday, and a Pentecostal grandmother in a white usher’s gown uses the word and means the blood. The we is the household of the saints, washed in the blood of the Lamb, and the bond runs through the Spirit and the church family that will sit with her when she is sick and bury her right when she dies. Solidarity for her is deliverance shared. It has a temperature and a sound, the organ and the shout, and it asks God for His mercy by His name. Tell her the circle should widen until it holds the welder’s commissar and the Berkeley atheist on equal terms with the saints, and she hears the dissolving of the one thing that will carry her through the grave. Her solidarity buries its dead with certainty. That is its test and its proof.

Cross again to a kollel in Jerusalem, where a young man bent over a folio of Talmud means Klal Yisrael when he says the word, the peoplehood of Israel, a covenant and a descent and a Torah braided into a single rope that runs back to Sinai and forward past his own death through the sons he will have. His solidarity is the most bounded of all and the most ancient. It will not widen, because the boundary is the point, the boundary is what God drew. To him the postethnic dream is the assimilationist’s solvent in a new bottle, the thing that emptied the Reform temples and that he has organized his entire life to refuse. He would tell you, without heat, that a we you can re-choose every morning is no we at all. The covenant chose him. He did not affiliate. He was born inside the rope.

Now put a software engineer in a glass building south of Hollinger’s hill, an effective altruist who tithes a third of his salary to malaria nets and writes spreadsheets that weigh the suffering of strangers ten thousand miles off against the suffering of his own neighbors and finds the neighbors carry no extra weight. He uses the word solidarity and means the impartial concern of one mind for all sentient things, the widening circle taken to its mathematical limit and past the human edge entirely, out to the animals and the unborn and the machines that might one day feel. Of all these people his version sits closest to Hollinger’s, and the two would still quarrel, because the engineer has run the cosmopolitan logic so far that it erases the particular faces Hollinger wanted to keep. The welder and the grandmother and the yeshiva student are rounding errors in his model. He has the widest circle anyone has yet drawn, and it is so wide it holds no one in particular, which is the danger that lives at the bottom of the wide circle and that Hollinger spent a career trying to outrun.

And then the Marine, twenty years old, who would find this whole catalogue of meanings ridiculous. Ask him about solidarity and he names the two men to his left and his right and tells you he will die for them and not for an idea, not for the circle, not for the species, not for the flag past a certain point, for them, by name, because they would do it for him. His we has three members and a fourth if you count the one who died last month. He has the smallest circle in the room and the one most willing to pay in blood, and the size and the cost run in exactly that direction, the narrow we paying the most and the wide we paying the least, which is the pattern Hollinger knows better than anyone alive and which sits at the heart of his own quiet tragedy.

Here the essay turns, because the strange thing about David Hollinger is that he is a connoisseur of hero systems. He did not need Becker. He spent the back half of his career building, on his own and out of the archive, an account of which faiths keep their young and which faiths bleed them out, and the account reads like a Becker case study written by a man who would never use the word.

His finding goes like this. The ecumenical Protestants, the liberal mainline, the Methodists and Presbyterians and Congregationalists who ran the seminaries and the foreign missions and the magazines, won the moral argument of the twentieth century. They came to tolerance. They came to science. They blessed the wider circle, repented of the missionary’s arrogance, opened their arms to other faiths and no faith, and dissolved the boundary between the saved and the rest. In After Cloven Tongues of Fire he names the cost in the title. Pentecost in the Book of Acts comes as tongues of fire that let the disciples speak every language at once, the boundary of nation burned away by the Spirit. The ecumenists had their own Pentecost, their own burning away of the boundary, and after the fire there was no church left to speak in. They won the argument and emptied the pews. Their children walked into the wider culture, into the universities and the professions and the secular cosmopolitan world, and never came back, because a faith that has dissolved its own edge gives a child no reason to stay inside it. Meanwhile the evangelicals, who lost the argument in every seminary that counted, kept the boundary, kept the enemy, kept the certainty, and filled the parking lots. The boundary-keepers persist. The boundary-dissolvers diffuse.

Becker might put it harder than Hollinger will. A hero system that promises a man significance through the dissolution of every particular bond cannot bury him. It has no funeral. It has no kin who must come. It has no name on a wall and no enemy whose defeat would mean his triumph. The widest circle is the thinnest, and the thinnest circle starves the very death-anxiety that drove a man to build a circle at all. Universal solidarity asks you to share a fate with everyone, and a fate shared with everyone is a fate shared with no one in the hour you need a hand on your shoulder. The grave wants descent. It wants the rope back to Sinai, the blood of the Lamb, the nation under the Black Madonna, the two men to your left and right. It does not want an affiliation you might revise next year.

Hollinger knows this. That is the part that lifts him out of the ordinary run of secular professors and makes him worth the close attention. He documented the death of his own side. He showed, in book after book, that the people who widened the circle lost the institutions and the children, and that the people who policed the edge kept both. He drew the curve and he read it correctly and he stayed on the losing half of it on purpose. The cosmopolitan, in his hands, becomes the man who has read the anthropology of his own faith, who knows the survival odds of the wide we, who can see that his solidarity will probably win the argument and lose the people, and who keeps the faith anyway because for him the truth of the wide circle outranks its odds of lasting. He chooses the meaning that cannot save him. By Becker’s own lights that might be the most heroic move available to a man, to look straight at the death of your hero system and serve it without the consolation that it will outlive you.

The descent-consent quarrel sits under all of it, and Hollinger took the terms from Werner Sollors (b. 1943), who split American identity into the line you inherit by blood and the line you choose by will. Descent against consent. Hollinger is the great American champion of consent, of the we you build by argument and affiliation, and Sollors’s own scholarship carries the warning Hollinger has spent his life trying to disprove. Consent communities are easy to leave. You can divorce one. You cannot divorce your blood. When the night comes and the diagnosis is bad, the consent community sends a thoughtful card and the descent community sends a casserole and a minyan and stays until morning. Hollinger wants the casserole to come from the chosen we, and the welder and the grandmother and the yeshiva student all tell him, in their different rooms and their incompatible accents, that it will not, that the casserole comes from the rope you were born inside, and that a man who cuts every rope in the name of the species will find the species busy elsewhere on the night he dies.

So we come back to the hymn. When This Mask of Flesh is Broken. A man raised by four generations of preachers leaves the faith, builds a hero system out of the secular cosmopolitan dream, proves by his own scholarship that the dream cannot keep its children, and reaches at the end for the hymn his great-grandfather sang to name the book about all of it. The mask of flesh breaks for the atheist as surely as for the saint. The question Becker leaves on the table, and the question Hollinger’s whole shelf circles without quite landing on, is which we shows up when it breaks. The widest one promises the most and arrives the least. The narrowest one promises the least and arrives with the casserole. Hollinger bet his life on the wide circle with his eyes open. A man can do worse than serve a faith he knows will not bury him. He cannot, though, pretend the narrow faiths do not know something about the grave that the wide one has forgotten, and to his credit, across eight books, Hollinger never quite pretends. He keeps the hymn. He keeps the word. He hands both forward and lets the reader decide how wide to draw the we, which is the most a cosmopolitan can honestly offer, and more than most of them admit.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology subverts the intellectual project of David Hollinger.
Hollinger is celebrated for proposing a “postethnic” vision for American society. He distinguishes between rigid, prescriptive multiculturalism, which locks individuals into their ethnic groups of origin, and a cosmopolitan postethnicism, which promotes voluntary, multiple affiliations. He argues that individuals can use their reason to choose and switch their cultural alignments, creating a more fluid, civic, and inclusive American democracy.
Mearsheimer’s realism undercuts Hollinger’s framework in several ways.
The core of Hollinger’s postethnic model is the shift from “descent” to “consent.” He argues that modern citizens should be free to choose which communities they affiliate with, rather than being defined permanently by their biological or ethnic ancestry.
If Mearsheimer is right, this capacity for conscious, fluid consent is an anthropological fiction. Human beings are born into a long, vulnerable childhood, requiring intense socialization within an existing group to survive. During this prolonged period, the family and local community impose a totalizing value infusion onto the child’s mind. By the time an individual develops the capacity for abstract reasoning, his foundational attachments, survival instincts, and primal loyalties are already sealed. Hollinger’s voluntary postethnic identity is a luxury concept that can only occur to a highly secure, wealthy academic elite; for the vast majority of the species, group identity is an inescapable inheritance that cannot be swapped like an affiliation badge.
In Protestants Abroad, Hollinger traces how American ecumenical missionaries returned from encounters with foreign cultures and helped dismantle domestic ethnocentrism, paving the way for a more cosmopolitan, inclusive nation. He views cosmopolitanism as a genuine intellectual escape from tribal provincialism.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology, paired with David Pinsof’s alliance theory, strips away this liberal optimism. Cosmopolitanism is the ideological standard of a highly sophisticated, dominant tribe. The ecumenical elites Hollinger chronicles did not transcend group logic. They formed a new, powerful, and secularized intellectual coalition that used the language of universal inclusion to claim moral authority and institutional dominance over more provincial, traditional, and nationalistic rival factions within American life. Their cosmopolitanism serves as a tool for status maintenance and reputation management, not a post-political sanctuary.
Hollinger argues that a postethnic nation can maintain its cohesion through a shared commitment to democratic processes, constitutional principles, and civic engagement, rather than relying on common blood or restrictive soil.
In Protestants Abroad and After Cloven Tongues of Fire, Hollinger tracks the mid-twentieth-century decline of mainstream, ecumenical Protestantism and the subsequent rise of a secularized, multicultural American intelligentsia. He analyzes this shift as a victory for intellectual transformation, arguing that ecumenical leaders chose to cede cultural territory because their encounters abroad made them too open-minded to maintain rigid, parochial dogmas.
Mearsheimer’s realism strips this narrative of its intellectual idealism, explaining it through the logic of coalition displacement. One elite group did not simply change its mind and hand over the keys to American culture. Rather, the traditional ecumenical establishment lost its material and institutional dominance because it failed to maintain its internal cohesion. It was outmaneuvered by a more aggressive, tightly bound coalition of secular, universalist intellectuals who used the language of cosmopolitanism to claim moral authority. The decline Hollinger documents is a classic example of group competition for institutional dominance, not a peaceful evolution toward a more enlightened, post-dogmatic consciousness.
A pillar of Hollinger’s postethnic vision is that individuals do not have to belong to just one group; they can maintain multiple, overlapping, and voluntary affiliations—such as being simultaneously loyal to an ethnic heritage, a professional guild, a civic nation, and a global humanitarian cause. He views this multi-layered identity as a buffer against tribal conflict.
Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of human preferences reveals the fragility of this setup. While an individual can maintain multiple affiliations during times of peace and material abundance, these identities are not equal in weight. Humans are social animals whose primary driver is group survival under conditions of structural anarchy. When a crisis occurs, the overlapping layers dissolve. A person cannot maintain equal loyalty to a global humanitarian cause and the specific group that secures his immediate survival. In any real conflict over resources, status, or security, the primary, unreflective value infusion received in childhood overrides all voluntary, secondary affiliations. Hollinger’s model functions only when the baseline security of the state is so total that the existential stakes of group membership are temporarily forgotten.
Hollinger views the ongoing American “culture wars” as an ideological and philosophical debate between provincial, defensive ethno-nationalists on one side and forward-looking, inclusive cosmopolitans on the other. He treats this divide as an intellectual problem that can be resolved by refining the civic promises of American democracy.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology reveals that the culture wars are not an intellectual disagreement, but a raw conflict between competing domestic tribes fighting for state control. The cosmopolitan language of inclusion and the provincial language of nationalism are the respective ideological standards used by these rival coalitions to mobilize their followers, police their boundaries, and manage their reputations. The conflict cannot be negotiated away through better civic theory because it is driven by the immutable logic of group competition. Each side is fighting to control the state machinery because the state is the ultimate vehicle for group preservation and status dominance.
Mearsheimer’s realism rejects the idea that abstract ideas can bind a large population when conditions deteriorate. Reason and text-based civic principles arrive late and rank last among human motivations. The primary environment of the social animal is the protective vehicle of the tribe, which offers security under conditions of structural anarchy and resource scarcity. Hollinger’s civic circle remains stable only as long as the state possesses overwhelming material power and faces no existential threats. The moment a systemic crisis or real scarcity hits, the thin, rational bonds of postethnic consensus are dropped. Individuals instantly fall back on the unreflective, exclusionary group identities that actually preserve life.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof is right, Hollinger’s optimistic cosmopolitan blueprint is an elegant masking operation. His historical frameworks treat group friction as a problem of bad ideas, when it is actually a competition for power.
In Postethnic America, Hollinger proposed that society should move beyond traditional multiculturalism—which traps individuals in fixed racial or ethnic boxes—toward a “postethnic” perspective. This model encourages flexible, voluntary affiliations and civic solidarity. He framed the fierce cultural wars over identity as a conceptual tangle that a more sophisticated, civic-minded framework could resolve. Pinsof might say that ethnic and racial groupings are not administrative misunderstandings or outdated concepts that people accidentally cling to. They are highly efficient, evolved coalitions used to compete for resources, status, and control over the state.
Hollinger’s cosmopolitan, “postethnic” ideal is not a neutral solution for the masses; it is a luxury belief tailored for the secular academic elite. For professors at Berkeley, voluntary, fluid identities work beautifully because their status is secured by their university credentials and cultural capital. For lower-status groups, fixed ethnic and coalitional loyalty is a vital shield and a tool to demand resources from the state. By advocating for a “postethnic” civic harmony, Hollinger is subtly asking groups to disarm their most potent political weapons, leaving the credentialed intelligentsia to manage the state unhindered.
In his 2022 book, Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular, Hollinger argued that ecumenical (liberal) Protestants successfully integrated Enlightenment values and opened America up to diversity, but in doing so, they lost ground to evangelical Protestants who weaponized a narrow, insular tribalism. He framed the rise of the religious right as a tragic distortion of Christian history and a failure of the public to appreciate liberal religious values.
Pinsof might say that the split between liberal secularism and evangelical conservatism is a zero-sum turf war over who gets to dictate the moral direction of the nation. The liberal Protestants Hollinger champions did not lose ground because of a strategic whoopsie or a lack of good marketing. They lost ground because they aligned themselves with the secular university elite and the administrative state.
The evangelicals are acting completely rationally: they built a rival coalition to protect their own status, family structures, and local authority from the coercive apparatus of a secular state guided by university professors. Hollinger frames this as a tragedy of religious regression, but it is actually a standard Darwinian counter-attack against a hostile elite
Hollinger, along with Charles Capper (1948-2021), edited The American Intellectual Tradition, one of the most widely used sourcebooks in college history courses. The textbook traces the evolution of American thought, operating on the implicit premise that understanding our intellectual history expands public perception and clarifies our democratic commitments.
Pinsof might say that a massive history textbook is an alliance-building device and a sorting tool. By deciding which essays and thinkers constitute the “authentic” American tradition, the historian establishes a professional monopoly over the national mind.
Hollinger did not compile these texts out of a disinterested love for the past. He built an apparatus that requires university professors to interpret. If the public can understand their country through raw political rallies or local traditions, the intellectual is redundant. But if understanding America requires mastering a dense canon of pragmatism, secularism, and cosmopolitanism, then Hollinger and his peers remain the indispensable gatekeepers of elite status, collecting credentials while supervising the view from the top of the academic hierarchy.

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The Anarchists’ Son in Perry Miller’s Chair

Posted on June 25, 2026 by Luke Ford

In Montreal, in the fall of 1933, two Jewish radicals name their son after two dead men. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti die in the electric chair in Massachusetts in 1927. Six years later the Bercovitches fold the two names into one and lay it on a baby. Sacvan. His mother, Bryna, writes; decades on she publishes a memoir she calls “Becoming Revolutionary.” The name the parents give the boy carries a verdict on the country to the south. It says he belongs to the executed, to the workers of the world, to the cause the American state killed in a Dedham courtroom.

The boy grows up to become the foremost American reader of the Puritans.

Sacvan Bercovitch (1933–2014) takes a long road into the New England mind. He studies at the New School and at Reed, earns a degree at Sir George Williams College in Montreal in 1958, finishes a doctorate at Claremont in 1965. He teaches at Brandeis, at the University of California-San Diego, at Princeton, at Columbia. In 1984 Harvard gives him the Powell M. Cabot Professorship in American Literature. The chair belonged to Perry Miller (1905–1963), the scholar who recovered the lost intellectual world of seventeenth-century New England and seated the Puritans at the head of the American imagination. The anarchists’ son takes the place in the shrine.

He builds his career on a single argument. America turns dissent into consensus. In The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975) and The American Jeremiad (1978) he traces a rhetoric that runs from the Puritan sermon through the Declaration and the Gettysburg Address and out into the national literature. The Puritan jeremiad laments the people’s fall from the errand, and in the lament it renews the errand. The complaint feeds the mission. The preacher who scolds the colony for backsliding has already agreed that the colony has a holy purpose worth backsliding from. In The Office of “The Scarlet Letter” (1991) and The Rites of Assent (1993) Bercovitch carries the argument into Hawthorne and into the liberal culture of the nineteenth century. He shows that the symbol of America holds such reach that it gathers up its own critics and seats them at the table. The man who attacks the country in the country’s name has accepted the terms. He has assented.

The argument earns him enemies on both flanks. The right reads him as a subversive, a founder of the New Americanists who pull down the canon. The left reads him as a consensus historian who launders American exceptionalism. Both sides miss the better joke, which is that Bercovitch supplies his own clearest case. The son named for two hanged anarchists takes Perry Miller’s chair, enters the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986, collects the Lowell Prize, the Hubbell, the Bode-Pearson, the lifetime awards. His dissent becomes the consensus’s crown. He performs the rite of assent with his career, then writes the book on it.

Here Ernest Becker (1924–1974) does the work. In The Denial of Death (1973) Becker argues that culture exists to let a man feel heroic in the face of his own end. Every society hands its members a hero system, a set of roles and prizes and sacred objects through which a mortal earns the sense that he counts and that some part of him will outlast the body. The hero system answers the terror of death with the promise of significance.

For Bercovitch the hero system is the text. Not the country, not the party, not the radical kitchen of his childhood. The text. He reads for a living, and reading confers on him the significance the revolutionary creed once promised his parents. The seminar room is the church. The close reading is the liturgy. The footnote is the laying on of hands, the touch by which a living scholar reaches a dead writer and an unborn student in one motion. His monument is the Cambridge History of American Literature, eight volumes, twenty years as general editor, a structure raised to stand after the builder lies down. A man who fears death edits an eight-volume history. The volumes keep their place on the shelf when the body goes into the ground.

Bercovitch gives his life to a single sacred word, and his lasting gift to scholarship is a demonstration. The word means a different thing inside each hero system that holds it dear. The word is America.

Run it past the believers and watch it change shape.

A Cuban man works a cafeteria window in Hialeah. He crossed the water in 1962 and built a counter that sells cortaditos to a line of men in guayaberas. For him America is the thing Havana stopped being. America is the deed to the property, the register he owns, the absence of the comandante. “Aquí nadie me quita lo mío,” he says. Here no one takes what is mine.

A Lakota man stands on dry land above Pine Ridge. For him America is the broken treaty, the Black Hills seized after the gold, the word on the parchment the courts affirm and the government ignores. America names the power that promised everything and kept nothing. “They signed it,” he says. “Ask them what their own signature buys.”

A Marine comes home to a town in eastern Ohio with the folded flag from his brother’s coffin. For him America is the oath he swore and the men he carried out. America is not an argument. It is a debt. “You weren’t there,” he says, and the sentence shuts the subject.

A Punjabi engineer raises a company in a rented room in Fremont. He arrived on a student visa with two suitcases and a thesis on compiler design. For him America is the place that lets a man with no name and no cousins raise money on a slide deck. America is the meritocracy, the garage, the term sheet. “Nobody asked who my father was,” he says, and he offers it as the highest praise a country can earn.

A Black church mother in Charleston sits in the second pew of an AME congregation older than the Republic. For her America is the promise still unpaid, the Jordan the people have not crossed. She sings an arrival she has not lived to see. “He may not come when you want Him,” she says, “but He’s always on time.” The America she loves lives in the future tense.

Five lives, one word. Five countries inside the borders of one. Becker accounts for the spread. The sacred object binds the hero system by meaning whatever the system needs it to mean. The Cuban’s America and the Lakota’s America cannot both be true, and each one bears the full weight of a life. To call either man wrong is to ask him to give up the thing that makes his days count against the dark. The word survives the contradiction because the contradiction never reaches consciousness. Each believer hears his own meaning and assumes the others hear the same. That assumption holds the country together. Bercovitch spent fifty years proving the country runs on it.

Late in life he goes home. He puts down the American text and returns to Yiddish. He translates Sholom Aleichem. He takes a Mellon grant for a project on the Ashkenazi Renaissance of 1880 to 1940, the lost world of the murdered millions, the tongue of the Montreal kitchen. The man who showed how America turns its dissenters into communicants spends his last working years among the ghosts his parents fled and mourned.

Becker reads the ending as the tell. What a man returns to when the career is spent shows what he held sacred beneath the official faith. Bercovitch served the American text across five decades and demonstrated that it could hold any meaning a believer carried to it. At the close he goes back to the one hero system that named him before he could speak. Sacco and Vanzetti. The son keeps faith with the dead men after all, in a language almost no one left alive can read.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology provides a striking, structural validation of Sacvan Bercovitch (1933–2014), the preeminent cultural historian of American Puritanism. At the same time, it completely flips the meaning of Bercovitch’s most famous concept: the American jeremiad.
Bercovitch argued that America is unique because its national identity is built entirely on a rhetorical and ideological matrix inherited from the New England Puritans. The jeremiad — a political sermon that laments the moral decline of the community while simultaneously reaffirming its sacred, exceptional mission — functions as a powerful ritual of consensus. For Bercovitch, dissent in America does not challenge the status quo; instead, by invoking the “promise of America,” critics are trapped by a rhetoric that binds them closer to the dominant liberal culture.
Mearsheimer’s realism interacts with Bercovitch’s critical framework across several primary concepts.
Bercovitch tracks how the Puritan political sermon successfully joined civic and spiritual selfhood into a single transcendent ideal: “America.” He demonstrates that this rhetoric allows the nation to absorb multi-ethnic immigrant groups under a shared identity of preordained purpose.
If Mearsheimer is right, Bercovitch has mapped the precise engineering of an exceptionally powerful tribal value infusion. Because the human animal has a long childhood, the group must inject its moral code into the individual before his critical faculties develop. The American jeremiad is not merely an interesting literary style; it is a highly evolved instrument of group socialization. It allows a vast, diverse population to function as a tightly bound, highly cooperative tribe. What Bercovitch calls the “rites of assent”—the cultural rituals through which individuals buy into the American myth—are the exact evolutionary mechanisms required to maintain internal cohesion in a competitive world.
Bercovitch’s most subtle insight is that ideological co-optation in the United States is absolute. When an American radical protests against the state, he almost always does so by demanding that the nation live up to its founding ideals of liberty and rights. Bercovitch argues that this form of protest unconsciously reinforces the mainstream liberal framework, ensuring that radical movements end up strengthening the capitalist state rather than subverting it.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology explains why this cage is inescapable. A man cannot easily reason his way out of his early childhood socialization. The moral language infused into him by his society forms the very boundaries of his thought. The American dissenter cannot invent a genuinely post-tribal critique because his mind has been shaped by the group’s survival rhetoric. His protest is not an independent act of pure reason; it is an internal negotiation within the tribe’s pre-established boundaries.
Bercovitch notes that the word “American” is unique because it combines intense nationality with a claim to universalism—the belief that the American model is a world-redeeming promise meant for all mankind. Mearsheimer’s The Great Delusion focuses on this precise trait, reading it as the fatal flaw of liberal states.
Here, Mearsheimer provides the hard structural consequence that Bercovitch avoids. Bercovitch analyzes the universalist myth as a self-perpetuating literary and cultural consensus that keeps domestic peace. Mearsheimer reveals that when this universalist tribe is turned outward into an anarchic international system, the myth becomes a engine of aggressive foreign policy. The American state, convinced that its parochial tribal values are actually universal human rights, seeks to remake other societies in its own image. Mearsheimer’s realism predicts the inevitable collapse of this ambition, showing that foreign populations, bound by their own childhood value infusions, will always reject the imported American script.
Bercovitch highlights how the New England Puritans relied heavily on “typology”—a method of biblical interpretation where they mapped their contemporary migration onto the historical journey of the ancient Israelites. They did not view themselves merely as a religious sect, but as the literal “New Israel” entering a promised wilderness. Bercovitch analyzes this as a brilliant rhetorical invention that fused secular history with sacred destiny.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology provides a functional, realist explanation for this typological maneuver. In an anarchic, unfamiliar, and hostile environment, a migrating group faces immediate existential threats. The primary requirement for survival is absolute internal solidarity and a clear definition of territorial rights. By adopting the identity of ancient Israel, the Puritan leadership deployed a highly effective tool for group cohesion. The typology did not operate as a detached literary style; it served to draw a sharp, unyielding boundary between the in-group and the out-group, justifying territorial acquisition and military mobilization against rival populations under the ultimate sanction of divine mandate.
In The Office of the Scarlet Letter (1991), Bercovitch traces how the early Puritan rhetoric of isolation and spiritual purity evolved smoothly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to endorse commercial enterprise, individual enterprise, and the rise of the industrial marketplace. He shows that the language of spiritual growth was seamlessly transferred to the growth of material wealth.
Mearsheimer’s realism explains this transition as a standard process of state optimization. A group’s cultural narratives always adapt to serve its material survival needs. As the American colonies expanded into a vast continental arena, isolation was no longer a viable strategy for long-term security in a competitive world. The state needed to maximize its material power, which required economic scaling, infrastructure, and wealth accumulation. The rhetorical shift Bercovitch documents is the cultural reflection of this structural transformation. The social animal did not abandon its tribal framework; it simply updated its ideological standard to sanctify the economic growth necessary to outcompete European rivals and project power across the continent.
A core element of Bercovitch’s analysis of the jeremiad is that the sermon relies on a permanent state of crisis. The ministers consistently claimed that the community was on the verge of ruin due to its sins, yet this declaration of crisis never led to despair; instead, it served to re-energize the community’s commitment to its mission. Bercovitch calls this a “rhetoric of controlled anxiety.”
Mearsheimer’s anthropology, paired with alliance theory, strips the psychological mystery from this pattern. The constant invocation of external or internal crisis is a classic strategy used by an elite coalition to maintain its status, manage its reputation, and enforce internal discipline. By keeping the population in a state of controlled anxiety, the ruling elite justifies its authority, silences domestic competitors, and ensures that individual resources remain dedicated to the preservation of the group’s institutions. The jeremiad’s cycle of lamentation and reaffirmation is the structural logic of a coalition maintaining its grip on power under the guise of moral reformation.
If Mearsheimer is right, Bercovitch stands as a master cartographer of the American mind. He correctly saw that American liberalism is not a bloodless collection of abstract rights, but a thick, totalizing, and deeply religious myth designed to enforce conformity. His realist correction is simply that this powerful consensus is not a unique cultural puzzle to be analyzed through literary close reading. It is the ideological armor of a highly competitive, exceptionally successful global tribe using universal language to preserve its own dominance.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof is right, Bercovitch’s entire framework is an elegant decoding of his own class’s ultimate survival strategy. The American jeremiad is not a deep psychological or cultural neurosis. It is the business model of the secular intelligentsia.

Bercovitch spent his career analyzing why American intellectuals, writers, and reformers are so obsessed with public lamentation. From the seventeenth-century Puritan ministers to nineteenth-century writers like Emerson, down to modern progressive activists, the formula is always identical: “We have strayed from our noble ideals, and we must reform ourselves to fulfill our mission.”

From Pinsof’s perspective, this ritualistic lamentation is a highly strategic tool used to secure elite status. By framing society’s problems as a failure to live up to stated ideals, the intellectual class builds a permanent market for its own intervention. If the problem with America is that it has a bad motive (e.g., raw greed or a desire for dominance), then you need a cop, a boundary, or a structural overhaul. But if the problem is that America has misunderstood its true mission, then you need an interpreter.

The jeremiad is a device that turns every structural, competitive conflict into a moral misunderstanding. The intellectual positions himself as the mandatory guide who gets to tell the public exactly how they have strayed and how they can be redeemed.

Bercovitch’s most famous insight was that in America, radical dissent is actually a form of consensus. When a critic stands up and says, “America is failing its promise of equality,” he is not destroying the myth; he is validating it by invoking the “promise.” Bercovitch argued that this ideological mechanism allows American capitalism to absorb every radical movement, turning rebellion into an affirmation of the status quo.

Pinsof’s logic reveals the raw interest behind this mechanism. The secular university class does not absorb dissent because they love cultural harmony; they absorb dissent to protect their monopoly over the attention economy. If a radical movement completely rejects the system, the university professor becomes obsolete.

By channeling raw, visceral anger into a rhetorical dispute over “American ideals,” the academic elite tames the threat. They take the raw energy of social conflict and translate it into articles, books, and Ph.D. seminars. It is a flawless turf defense: it transforms an existential threat to the hierarchy into a fresh supply of academic capital, ensuring that no matter how angry the public gets, the intellectual class remains in charge of the curriculum.

Bercovitch traveled the world lecturing on the “American consensus,” analyzing how language traps citizens in a loop of self-correction. He wrote with a brilliant, ironic detachment, positioning himself as the ultimate secular observer of this massive ideological trap.

If Pinsof is right, Bercovitch’s brilliant detachment was the ultimate status signal. By mapping the exact boundaries of the ideological hole Americans are stuck in, Bercovitch established himself at the absolute apex of the academic hierarchy. He wasn’t solving the misunderstanding; he was proving that the misunderstanding was so deep, and so total, that only a Harvard professor of the highest order could trace its lineage. He did not aim to dismantle the American ideology because that ideology was the exact machine that paid his salary, granted him tenure, and ensured his name would be remembered as the definitive chronicler of the national mind.

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Ruth Wisse Against the Schlemiel

Posted on June 25, 2026 by Luke Ford

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued that every culture hands its members a plan for mattering. The plan tells a man what counts as a life well spent, what raises him above the worm and the dirt, what lets him believe his death will not erase him. Becker called the plan a hero system. Inside it, a handful of words turn sacred. They name the tokens a man trades for significance. Honor. Purity. Freedom. Service. The words look universal. They are not. Each one means what its system needs it to mean, and a man raised in one system can hear the same word spoken in another and feel nothing at all, or feel disgust.

Ruth Wisse (b. 1936) spent a career on this recognition before she fought a single political fight over it.

Her first book, The Schlemiel as a Modern Hero (1971), took the luckless fool of Yiddish letters and read him as the central figure of the modern Jewish imagination. The schlemiel loses. He spills the soup, marries the wrong woman, misses the train, trusts the man who robs him. The world breaks him and he keeps his sweetness. In the breaking, Wisse found a claim. The fool’s defeat indicts the world that defeats him. He cannot win, so he turns losing into the proof of his soul. He has no army and no court that will hear him, so he keeps his wit and his wound and makes them a sign that he stands higher than the men who crush him.

The schlemiel offers a hero system. It hands the powerless a way to matter. You own no land you can hold and no force that answers to you, and you survive by converting that condition into a verdict against power as such. Strength becomes the marker of the brute. Weakness becomes the marker of the just. A man dies poor and beaten and the system tells him he died right.

Wisse the scholar loved this figure. Wisse the political writer spent forty years warning that a people might die of him.

Jews and Power (2007) is the warning set down in full. She read the long exile as a school that taught Jews to treat weakness as wisdom, accommodation as ethics, the refusal of force as a higher law. The lesson worked for centuries. A people without a state learned to bend, to pay, to flatter the prince, to survive by never holding the sword. Then, in the middle of the twentieth century, the strategy failed in the worst way a strategy can fail a people, and no amount of moral elevation answered the trains. Zionism, in her reading, recovered the thing exile had taught Jews to despise. Power. Not a sin to confess but the price of staying alive.

So the figure that anchors her scholarship becomes the alarm of her politics. The schlemiel on the page is a treasure. The schlemiel running a foreign ministry is a death sentence.

Power is her sacred word, and she uses it against the grain of almost everyone around her. To see how strange her usage runs, set it beside the others.

Walk into a Friends meeting house on a cold morning. The benches face inward. Nobody speaks until the Spirit moves him, and when a man rises he speaks of the light, not of force. Here power is the thing the righteous lay down. The Quaker earns his place in the order of the saved by renunciation. To hold a weapon, to command, to compel, all of it stains. A man matters in this room by how much he refuses. Tell him that a people has a duty to seize power and you have described to him a fall from grace. He hears in Wisse the voice of the world he left.

Down the corridor from Wisse’s own department sits the seminar where power means the opposite again. The graduate students there breathe a theory that owes its temper to Michel Foucault (1926-1984). Power is the air. It runs through every clinic and classroom and bedroom, capillary, total, hidden in the things that look most innocent. The hero of this system is the one who unmasks it. He earns significance by exposure, by naming the domination others cannot see. To want power, to call for it openly as a good, marks a man as the villain the seminar exists to catch. Wisse walks in asking Jews to gather strength and take it, and the room hears the enemy speaking without shame.

Cross the ocean to a hill town where an older man holds court at a back table. For him power and respect are one word. A man is what other men dare not do to him. To be strong is to be safe and to be safe is to be a man, and the one without strength gets eaten and deserves the eating. This patriarch would understand Wisse’s politics in his marrow. He has never needed a book to tell him that the weak are prey. Hand him The Schlemiel as a Modern Hero and he would not finish the first chapter. The fool who turns his beating into a halo strikes him as the lowest thing alive, a man who licks the boot and calls the taste honey.

Sit a fourth man on a cushion in a monastery in the hills above a valley in Sri Lanka. He has shaved his head and given away his name. For him the only power worth the word is power over the self, and a man wins it by emptying the self until there is nothing left to defend. Worldly power is the heaviest chain. The prince and the general drag more weight toward the next life than the beggar does. To this monk, Wisse’s nation under arms is a vast and clever cage, a people that has mistaken the lock for the key. He would grieve for her the way one grieves for the diligent.

Four rooms, one word, four salvations that cannot share a house. The Quaker is saved by laying power down. The theorist by exposing it. The patriarch by holding it. The monk by escaping it. Wisse stands apart from all of them. She says a people is saved by taking power and keeping it and refusing to apologize for the taking, and she says this knowing the company it puts her in, because she has read every argument the other rooms can make and judged them luxuries of men who were never marched anywhere.

The same split runs through her other sacred words. Free As A Jew (2021), her memoir, carries the subtitle A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation, and the phrase tells you that freedom for Wisse is a thing a people wins together or not at all. The founder who prizes the unencumbered self hears freedom as escape from the group, from the family, from the inherited claim. Wisse hears it as the group grown strong enough that escape stops being the only safety a man can find. To her the lone free individual standing outside any people is a man who has not yet met the morning when the people he disowned would have been the only thing between him and the dark.

If I Am Not For Myself (1992) takes its title from Hillel and aims it at the liberal conscience. The liberal earns significance by transcending his tribe, by caring for the stranger first and the cousin second, by treating loyalty to his own as a smallness he has outgrown. Wisse charges that a conscience built to erase your own people is a betrayal wearing the robes of ethics. The word universalism, sacred in one room as the proof of a large soul, reads in hers as the schlemiel’s old trick in a professor’s vocabulary, the powerless flattering himself that his powerlessness is moral height.

She returned to the comedy at the end. No Joke (2013) studies Jewish humor with love and with fear in equal measure. The joke lets the powerless feel superior to the man with the whip. It also lets him stay under the whip and laugh. The same instrument saves and sedates. The schlemiel’s wit is his blade and his bed, and Wisse spent her late career trying to wake the man who had grown comfortable lying in it.

Her refusal to soften made her a figure of controversy long before the campus turned against her. She once described Palestinians as people who breed and bleed and advertise their misery, and the line followed her for decades, quoted by every critic who wanted to show the cost of her hardness. She did not retract it. In her system the cruelty of plain speech ranks below the cruelty of comforting lies, and a sentence that makes an enemy of the squeamish is a sentence doing its work.

The clearest scene came at Harvard in the fall of 2010. Wisse held the Martin Peretz Professorship of Yiddish Literature, a chair named for the editor and patron Martin Peretz (b. 1938), no relation to the Yiddish master I.L. Peretz (1852-1915) whose reader she edited. The university moved to cancel an event honoring the man whose name she carried, after he wrote a line dismissing Muslim life. Wisse defended him and called the campus reaction groupthink. She argued that asking Muslims to condemn the violence among them counted as liberality rather than bigotry. The room she stood in by then ran on the theorist’s creed, where her defense sounded like the villain confessing, and she made it anyway, holding a chair named for the accused, an old woman telling a faculty that had stopped listening to her exactly what she thought.

Here the essay has to face the thing that makes Wisse rare among the subjects of a hero system reading. She is a scholar of hero systems. The Schlemiel as a Modern Hero is a study of one. She knows the frame from the inside, names the powerless their own form of nobility, and then turns and chooses against it. The question she leaves behind is whether she escaped the schlemiel or only built his opposite.

Becker would say no man escapes. There is no standing outside every system, no view from nowhere that lets you keep significance without a story that confers it. There is only the choice of which story, and whether you know you are inside one. Wisse’s counter-hero, the armed and sovereign Jew who apologizes to no one, is a hero system in its own right. It has its sacred tokens, power and sovereignty and national honor, and its own denials, and it can curdle into the patriarch at the back table who mistakes contempt for strength. She knew this. The knowing is the honest part of her. She did not pretend the sovereign Jew floated free of the conditions that made him. She named the schlemiel a hero system, weighed it, and rejected it with open eyes, on the ground that a beautiful answer to powerlessness is still an answer to powerlessness, and a people that loves the answer too long forgets to fix the condition.

What she could not promise, and did not, was that the cure keeps its memory. The schlemiel knew something true about the men who hold the whip, because he had spent two thousand years on the wrong end of it. The sovereign Jew commands the whip now. Wisse spent her life arguing he had to. She left open the harder question, the one Becker would have pressed, of whether a people can hold power and still hold what the powerless understood, or whether each hero system buys its courage by forgetting the wisdom of the one it replaced.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology provides an emphatic confirmation of the central cultural and political theories of Ruth Wisse
Wisse has spent decades analyzing the intersection of literature, politics, and Jewish survival. In foundational books like If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews (1992) and Jews and Power (2007), she mounts a relentless critique of modern liberal universalism. She argues that the Jewish people’s historical vulnerability stems from an over-reliance on moral suasion, international law, and the goodwill of others, which blinds them to the hard reality of political hostility. Wisse champions a robust, clear-eyed appreciation for national particularism and the legitimate exercise of political power.
Mearsheimer’s realism intersects with Wisse’s framework across several key concepts.
Wisse’s central polemic is that liberalism is dangerous for minority groups because it downplays the permanent reality of collective hatred and group competition. She argues that Jews who adopt a universalist, liberal worldview mistakenly believe that if they champion abstract human rights, the rest of the world will treat them as atomistic individuals rather than as members of a distinct tribe. Mearsheimer’s The Great Delusion validates Wisse’s core thesis. Liberalism’s fundamental error is its treatment of people as lone choosers rather than as social animals embedded in competing groups. When Wisse observes that universalist liberal illusions leave a society unprotected against aggressive, cohesive neighbors, she is describing exactly what Mearsheimer’s anthropology predicts.
As a preeminent scholar of Yiddish literature, Wisse treats the works of Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer not merely as aesthetic monuments, but as psychological maps of a people navigating stateless vulnerability. In The Modern Jewish Canon (2000), she tracks how literature serves to sustain collective consciousness, preserve memory, and reinforce internal cohesion without the protective framework of a state. Mearsheimer’s concept of the “value infusion” explains why this literature possesses such enduring power. The child downloads the group’s stories and moral categories long before his independent critical reason matures. The rich linguistic and narrative heritage Wisse spent her career documenting is the literal tool used to seal group identity, anchoring the individual within the survival vehicle of the culture.
In Jews and Power, Wisse argues that the return to sovereignty in the State of Israel required an agonizing psychological shift away from the traditional diasporic strategy of accommodation toward the hard management of military power. She views anti-Zionism not as an intellectual disagreement, but as an expression of the permanent, structural opposition that small, cohesive groups face from rival coalitions in the international arena. Mearsheimer’s structural realism confirms Wisse’s diagnosis: under conditions of international anarchy, any group that refuses to maximize its material power and defend its sovereignty will eventually be dominated by its neighbors. Wisse’s historical critique of Jewish political dependency is a literary expression of Mearsheimer’s hard realist architecture.
Wisse has consistently criticized Western intellectuals who seek a post-national, cosmopolitan world order, viewing their campaigns for global governance or universal human rights as a dangerous evasion of the primary duties owed to one’s own people. Mearsheimer, bolstered by alliance theory, agrees that the cosmopolitan is a tribesman in universal language. The belief that humanity can transcend its tribal baseline through shared liberal institutions is an anthropological fantasy. Wisse identifies this universalism as a targeted threat to her group’s survival; Mearsheimer identifies it as a structural delusion that inevitably shatters against the permanent reality of human nature and collective competition.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

Ruth Wisse’s intellectual brand is built on explicitly exposing and mocking the progressive “misunderstandings myth.”
As the longtime Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature at Harvard and a fierce polemicist for Commentary, Wisse spent her career arguing that Western liberals suffer from a delusional, suicidal misunderstanding about the nature of politics and antisemitism.
If Pinsof is right, Wisse’s fierce anti-liberal realism is not an escape from the intellectual status game. It is a highly sophisticated, conservative variant of it.
In her landmark 1992 book, If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews, Wisse argued that Jewish liberals suffer from a pathology of universalism. She claimed they foolishly believe that if they are nice, progressive, and demonstrate universal empathy, the rest of the world will stop hating them. She framed this as a devastating cognitive and historical error.
Wisse is using the language of delusion to weaponize her own intellectual position. By framing liberal universalism as a naive “whoopsie” or a mental defect, she avoids recognizing that progressive Jewish intellectuals are actually rational actors playing a different coalitional strategy.
For a progressive academic in a secular university, championing universalism and civil rights is a highly effective way to forge alliances with other elite factions and secure status within the institution. Wisse does not admit that this is a rational turf strategy; she calls it a “betrayal” and a delusion. This allows her to position her circle—the neoconservative, nationalist intelligentsia—as the only adult in the room who truly understands reality.
Wisse’s literary scholarship, from The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (1971) to Jews and Power (2007), argues that because Jews lacked a state and control over a military apparatus for two millennia, they developed a brilliant but dangerous literary culture that sublimated weakness into moral superiority. The “schlemiel” (the classic comic underdog) wins arguments by being a moral victim, completely helpless against raw force. Wisse warned that this literary habit crippled the Jewish ability to understand and wield hard state power.
Wisse’s critique of the “moral underdog” is a direct strike against a rival currency. The intellectual class excels at transforming material weakness into moral authority; it is their primary tool to make the strong feel guilty and cede control.By declaring that the celebration of helplessness is a dangerous cultural malfunction, Wisse attempts to devalue the currency of the universalist literary elite. She is engaged in a zero-sum turf war over what kind of intellectual gets to advise the state. She wants to replace the soft, empathetic literary critic with the hard-headed, strategic intellectual who understands that politics is about drawing borders, identifying enemies, and using the coercive apparatus of the state at gunpoint.
Wisse pioneered the academic study of Yiddish literature, culminating in The Modern Jewish Canon (2000). She did not want Yiddish studied merely as a nostalgic, dead dialect of secular socialists. She curated the canon to highlight writers who wrestled with national survival, theological rigor, and the harsh realities of political power.
Pisnof might say that the creation of The Modern Jewish Canon was a flawless exercise in elite resource acquisition and institutional control. In the late twentieth-century university, the old WASP literary monopoly was breaking down. New ethnic studies departments were popping up, usually dominated by the progressive left.
Wisse did not fight this trend by defending the old order; she launched a counter-takeover.
By institutionalizing Yiddish at Harvard under her specific, national-conservative framework, she carved out an independent fiefdom. She ensured that you could not study this massive repository of European Jewish culture without using her textbooks, her anthologies, and her political framing.
Wisse demonstrates Pinsof’s ultimate point. The world functions exactly as natural selection designed it to: rival coalitions fighting for dominance, territory, and institutional real estate. Wisse mocks the progressive intellectuals for thinking they can save the world through soft, empathetic reading lists. But her solution is identical: a hard, nationalist reading list that establishes her as the high priestess of the canon, collecting elite credentials from Harvard while expertly managing the view from her own corner of the hole.

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The Man Who Lived in the Conjunction: A Hero System Reading of Stephen J. Whitfield

Posted on June 25, 2026 by Luke Ford

Stephen J. Whitfield (b. 1942) built a life out of a single word, and the word is but.

Read his sentences on southern Jewry and you find the pattern everywhere. None of the features of Jewish life in the South was unique, but the expression of Jewish identity below the Mason-Dixon line assumed a different form. Southern Jews have more in common with small-town Jews in Iowa than with Jews in Atlanta, but there is plenty of evidence of distinctiveness. He never encountered antisemitism growing up, but he hopes he has not ignored it. His profiler, Deborah Weiner, caught this and named it. He tends to present more than one side of a question, she wrote, not from any unwillingness to take a stand, but from a sense of how complexity multiplies when humans interact. The conjunction is the smallest unit of his faith.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued that every man builds a hero system, a scheme of meaning that lets him feel he counts in a universe that will kill him. The hero system tells him what acts are noble, what death is worth dying, what immortality he can earn. Becker’s deeper point cuts harder. The hero system is not chosen from a menu. It is the air a man breathes, and it makes his most sacred words mean what they mean. Two men can both say freedom or authenticity or home and refer to incompatible things, because each word draws its charge from the system that houses it. The word travels. The meaning does not.

Whitfield’s hero system has a name, and he gives it himself. His interest in any subject, he said, stems from an impulse to see his own life within a broader framework, as a way to connect to other people. The sense of connection to others, he said, is what makes life meaningful. That is the immortality project. Not the synagogue, not the nation, not the bloodline as such, but the act of linking. He revels in connecting disparate people, places, and events. He notes in the middle of an essay on Jewish business networks that the initials MGM were said to stand for Mayer’s ganze mishpoche, Mayer’s whole family. The joke is the method. To connect is to defeat the isolation that is, for Whitfield, the real form of death.

This essay takes his sacred words one at a time. For each, I show what it means inside his hero system, and then I set beside it men and women whose hero systems make the same word mean something he would not recognize. There is never only one rival. Becker’s universe is crowded with competing schemes, each certain it has found the way to count.

Connection

Start where he starts. The historian’s craft, for Whitfield, is a technology of connection across time. Knowledge of the Jewish past, he said, is the key to conserving the Jewish future, and the link between the two is intimate and intricate. He travels from Boston to a conference in Richmond in 1976 to tap back into his past, and the conference makes him permanently a southern Jewish historian. He loves the Southern Jewish Historical Society because professionals and amateurs sit in the same room, the scholar beside the man who simply wants to honor his family. He calls this combination charming and noble. The curse of academic life, he said, is its esoteric nature, the inability to make scholarship accessible. Connection is the cure.

So when Whitfield says connection he means a horizontal reaching outward, across difference, toward strangers who become friends for life. He loved the northern Jews he met at Tulane University because they enlarged him. Connection for him runs sideways and forward, scholar to layman, present to past, Jew to southerner, self to the broad human story.

Now hear the word in other mouths.

A man in a Gerrer kollel in Jerusalem says connection and means dveikus, cleaving to God through the text in front of him. The connection runs vertical, not horizontal. It does not reach toward the diversity of human experience. It reaches up, through the same daf of Gemara his grandfather learned, toward a fixed point that does not change and was never meant to. Whitfield prizes the man who absorbs outside influences and carries on, the Jew of dynamic receptivity. The kollel man builds his hero system on the opposite premise. Receptivity to outside influence is the danger, and the wall against it is the achievement. Both men say they want Jewish continuity. They mean enemy things by it. For Whitfield continuity is a river that takes in every tributary and stays a river. For the kollel man continuity is a flame guarded from every wind.

A Sicilian fishmonger in Catania says connection and means blood and street, the cousins who supply him, the priest who buried his father, the four square blocks where everyone knows whose son he is. He would find Whitfield’s connection thin to the point of unreality. Reaching toward strangers, becoming friends for life with people met at a conference, treating the whole human story as your family, that is not connection to the fishmonger. That is the absence of family, dressed up. His hero system rewards the man who narrows, who knows exactly where his loyalties stop. Whitfield’s rewards the man who widens. Each looks at the other and sees a defect of love.

A career diplomat in the Indian foreign service says connection and means the management of relations between states, a craft of leverage and signal where warmth is a tool and trust a calculated extension of credit. He connects nations the way Whitfield connects ideas, but for him the skill is to remain unconnected at the core, to keep the self in reserve so the state can be served. Whitfield gives himself away to his subjects. The diplomat’s hero system would call that amateurism.

The word is one word. Stand it in four hero systems and it points four directions.

Authenticity

Whitfield dates his own awakening to Sartre. He read Anti-Semite and Jew as an undergraduate and took from it a charge that organized the rest of his life. If this is who you are, Sartre told him, you might as well cultivate that fact and try to make sense of it. You define yourself rather than letting others define you. You take the raw datum of your existence and give it meaning by figuring out what sense can be made of it. That is Whitfield’s authenticity. It is an act of interpretation performed on a given. He did not choose to be the son of refugees, the Jewish boy in the white Jacksonville high school with no athletic ability and a father whose German accent drew amusement. He chose what to make of it. The northern Jews at Tulane struck him as more authentic than he was, and the envy in that word is the engine of a career. Authenticity, for him, is the self-aware construction of a self out of materials you were handed.

This is a particular and historically recent idea, and it would baffle most of the men who have ever lived.

A Korean baduk master of the old school says authenticity and means erasing the self until only the correct move remains. The whole training aims at the disappearance of the idiosyncratic personality, the willful ego, the man who wants to express himself. Mastery is fidelity to the board, to the joseki handed down, to the thing itself. Whitfield’s authenticity, the Sartrean making of meaning out of one’s own datum, would read to him as a failure to mature, a clinging to the small self that real discipline dissolves. For Whitfield you become authentic by claiming your particularity. For the master you become real by surrendering it.

A Pentecostal pastor in a San Salvador storefront says authenticity and means being born again, the old self crucified, the new self received as a gift from outside. Authenticity is not the cultivation of who you already are. It is the death of who you already are. The testimony always runs the same way: I was this, and then God made me that. Whitfield’s project, take the given facts of your existence and make sense of them yourself, is precisely the self-reliance the pastor preaches against. The pastor’s hero system makes a virtue of being defined by Another. Sartre’s makes a virtue of refusing exactly that. Each man would diagnose the other’s authenticity as the deepest form of bad faith.

A Lakota man pursuing the old ways says authenticity and means living rightly inside a web of obligation to ancestors, land, and the people, a self that is real only as a node in a kinship that precedes him and outlasts him. The free-floating Sartrean chooser, the man who makes his own meaning from his own datum, is to him a symptom of the very rootlessness that broke the world. Whitfield finds his authenticity by stepping back from inherited community enough to interpret it. The Lakota man finds his by refusing that step.

Sartre handed Whitfield a key. The key turns only in the lock his hero system built.

Freedom

For the 350th anniversary of Jews in America, Whitfield reached for Oscar Handlin‘s phrase, adventure in freedom. He held it as both the joy and the challenge. Freedom can be abused, he said, it can even be scuttled, but it can also be an extraordinary challenge that is met. America gave the Jews freedom, and freedom let many of them opt out, marry away, dissolve. He counts the losses without flinching. And still he remains affirmative, because the same freedom that lets a man abandon his Jewishness lets the Jewish people renew itself in unpromising soil like the rural South. Freedom for Whitfield is the open field where identity is neither enforced nor protected, where it must be chosen again in every generation or lost. The danger is the price of the dignity. He would not trade it.

A village imam in the Hadhramaut says freedom and means submission, the deliberate placing of the self under a law that relieves the unbearable weight of self-authorship. Islam names it. The truly free man is the one who has stopped having to invent his own way and can rest inside a path laid down. Whitfield’s freedom, the open field where you must choose your identity or lose it, looks to the imam like a sentence rather than a gift, a condemnation to permanent anxiety. What Whitfield calls adventure the imam calls exile.

A cadre in the Chinese party-state says freedom and means the collective mastery of historical forces, the nation lifted out of humiliation and want by discipline and direction. Individual freedom, the right to opt out, the open field, reads to him as the chaos the discipline exists to prevent. Whitfield finds the abandonment of Jewishness a price worth paying for the dignity of the open choice. The cadre finds the chaos of unmastered choice the very thing a serious people organizes itself to escape. Each calls the other’s freedom a kind of slavery.

A cloistered Carthusian monk says freedom and means liberation from the tyranny of the appetites and the noise of the world, achieved through enclosure, silence, and a rule that fixes every hour. He has given away almost everything Whitfield means by freedom, the mobility, the open field, the adventure, and he experiences the gift in the giving. Whitfield’s freedom is freedom to. The monk’s is freedom from. The same word names the cell and names the open road.

Whitfield can hold freedom as an adventure because his hero system was built by people who crossed an ocean and made something of the crossing. His father met his mother on the Île de France steaming toward a job rumor in California, got as far as Houston, and sold Fuller brushes door to door. The freedom that nearly dissolved the family is the freedom that produced the son who would spend his life praising it. The imam, the cadre, and the monk were built by different crossings, or by the refusal to cross at all.

Distinctiveness

Here Whitfield takes his clearest stand, and it reveals the structure of the whole. Some scholars argue that southern Jewish history is not really distinct, that the impact of region has been overstated. Whitfield disagrees, and his argument is pure hero system. The chief evidence of distinctiveness, he says, is that southern Jews themselves think they are different and are conscious of being different. That subjective awareness is a datum of history that should be acknowledged. As long as you grant people the right to choose who they think they are, the degree to which they choose to think of themselves as southerners should not be dismissed by historians as false consciousness.

Sit with what he has done. He has made self-understanding the bedrock of the real. A people is what it believes itself to be. This is the Sartrean key again, scaled from the man to the group. You give the datum of your existence meaning by making sense of it, and the meaning you make is not an illusion to be corrected by the expert. It is the fact itself. Distinctiveness for Whitfield is a thing people author and the historian honors.

A Marxist labor historian of the old materialist school says distinctiveness and means false consciousness, exactly the verdict Whitfield refuses. The southern Jewish merchant’s sense of being a special southerner is, to him, ideology, the story a class tells itself to obscure its real position in the relations of production. The historian’s job is not to honor the self-understanding but to see through it to the material base beneath. Whitfield grants people the right to choose who they think they are. The materialist treats that right as the very mist he is paid to burn off. One man’s sacred datum is the other man’s symptom.

A population geneticist says distinctiveness and means measurable variance, allele frequencies, the cold arithmetic of descent. Subjective awareness is noise. What a group feels about itself has no standing in his account of what the group is. Whitfield builds the real out of self-understanding. The geneticist builds it out of the things that are true whether anyone feels them or not. They would not even agree on what kind of question the question is.

A hardline Israeli advocate of kibbutz galuyot, the ingathering of the exiles, says distinctiveness and means a galut deformation, a diaspora particularity that the return to the land exists to dissolve. Southern Jewishness, Lithuanian Jewishness, Moroccan Jewishness, all of it is the scar tissue of exile, to be melted into the single new Hebrew. Whitfield wants the South integrated into Jewish history precisely so that readers feel the sheer plurality of Jewish ways of being. The ingatherer wants the plurality ended. Whitfield’s distinctiveness is a treasure of the diaspora. The ingatherer’s is its disease.

Notice that Whitfield’s defense of distinctiveness is the same gesture as his love of connection. He honors what people believe themselves to be because that honoring is how he connects to them. To tell a man his self-understanding is false consciousness is to refuse connection, to stand above rather than beside. His epistemology and his immortality project are one thing seen twice.

The Past

The deepest layer. Whitfield read Hannah Arendt‘s The Origins of Totalitarianism and it hit him, he said, like a thunderclap, the most important book he ever read. His mother mailed him Arendt’s New Yorker pieces on the Eichmann trial. Arendt was a refugee from Nazism like his parents, and that fact stirred him. His hero system is built against a specific death, the death that came for the Jews of Europe and missed his family by the width of a 1938 sailing. Knowledge of the past, he said, is the key to conserving the future. The historian stands guard at the seam between what was and what will be. To forget is to let the murder finish its work. To remember is the resistance.

So the past for Whitfield is a moral charge, a debt to the dead, a defense against totalitarian forgetting. It is also, characteristically, two-sided, full of loss and renewal at once, never a simple inheritance.

A Theravada monk in a forest monastery says the past and means attachment, the chain of clinging that binds a man to suffering. The work is to release the grip of memory, to stop authoring a self out of what was. Whitfield’s sacred labor, the careful conservation of the past as the key to the future, is to the monk the very disease, the refusal to let go that keeps the wheel turning. Whitfield guards the past. The monk practices its surrender.

A Silicon Valley founder of the accelerationist temper says the past and means legacy systems, friction, the dead hand to be routed around. His hero system rewards the man who breaks with what was, who treats inheritance as technical debt. Whitfield’s intricate and intricate link between past and future, where you cannot have the future without conserving the past, reads to the founder as nostalgia, a brake on the only motion that counts. Whitfield’s debt to the dead is the founder’s drag coefficient.

An Australian Aboriginal elder says the past and means the Dreaming, an order that is not behind the present but underneath it, always present, sung into the land and renewed in ceremony. The past is not a record to be conserved against forgetting. It is a living law that was never not here. Whitfield’s past is fragile, threatened, in need of journals and historians to keep it from slipping away. The elder’s past cannot slip away, because it is not a past in Whitfield’s sense at all. It is the ground.

Whitfield’s vigilance over memory makes sense only for a man whose people were nearly erased and who knows it. The forest monk, the founder, and the elder are guarding against other deaths, or against the very idea of guarding.

The Conjunction, Again

Return to the but. We can now see what it is for. Every hero system in this essay is, in Becker’s terms, a defense against death, and most of them defend by closing. The kollel man closes against influence. The Sicilian closes against the stranger. The cadre closes against chaos. The ingatherer closes against exile. They achieve solidity by drawing a line and standing inside it. This is the ordinary architecture of the hero system, and it works. It gives a man a place to stand and a death worth dying.

Whitfield’s hero system defends by the opposite move. It refuses to close. The but is the refusal made grammatical. Every time he reaches a conclusion he reaches for the conjunction that opens it back up, because for him the sin is not error, it is isolation, and a closed system is a lonely one. He will not plunk down for southern history or Jewish history. He insists on moving in two directions at once. He holds loss and renewal together and declines to resolve them. Weiner saw that his declarations are evocative rather than definitive, that he gives a starting point rather than a conclusion. She read it as temperament. It is theology. The open conclusion is how a man who has made connection his immortality project keeps from severing himself from anyone.

This carries a cost he half admits. He grew up never meeting antisemitism, and he confesses that he has therefore tended to downplay its scope, in the South and in America at large. The same openness that lets him connect across every line also softens his eye for the men on the other side of those lines who are not interested in connection, who are building their hero systems precisely against his. A scheme of meaning built on reaching toward strangers has trouble seeing the stranger who is reaching for a knife. Whitfield knows this about himself and says so, which is itself an instance of the but. Even his blind spot he holds two-sidedly.

Becker would say there is no neutral ground here, no vantage from which one could rank these systems and award the prize. Each man is doing the same work, building a defense against the same darkness, and each has found a different wall. Whitfield’s distinction is that his wall is a door. He spent fifty years standing in the doorway, the immigrants’ son in the South and the southerner in the North, the American child of Europeans, holding it open with a conjunction so that the people on both sides might, for a sentence or two, feel connected to each other and to him. That is his bid against oblivion. He wants to be remembered as the man who linked things. The wanting is the most human thing about him, and it is the thing he shares with the kollel man and the fishmonger and the monk, all of whom want the same immortality by opposite means.

The word but will not save anyone from death. Whitfield knows that too. He chose it anyway, and a life spent inside a conjunction is its own answer to the question Becker says we are all answering, the question of how to matter in the time we have. He decided to matter by joining. Then he wrote it down, so it would last.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology challenges the cultural history and political analysis of Stephen J. Whitfield.
Whitfield’s scholarship—most notably The Culture of the Cold War (1991), A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (1988), and In Search of American Jewish Culture (1999) focuses on the power of political ideologies, state-sponsored paranoia, and ethnic expression to shape human behavior. He operates within a classic liberal-historical framework, analyzing how democratic societies either betray their own values under pressure or successfully integrate minority traditions through pluralism. Mearsheimer’s realism undercuts Whitfield’s analysis across several areas.
In The Culture of the Cold War, Whitfield chronicles the pervasive ideological policing of American life in the 1950s, showing how politics manipulated Hollywood, literature, and education to enforce a rigid anti-communist consensus. He treats this era as a tragic deformation of American civil liberties, driven by political demagogues and an irrational domestic anxiety.
If Mearsheimer is right, Whitfield misdiagnoses a standard structural survival response as a domestic political malfunction. In an anarchic international system, the primary obligation of the state is to maximize its power and ensure its survival against rival superpowers. The domestic conformity, red-baiting, and institutional policing that Whitfield documents were not ideological excesses; they were the execution of intensive group socialization.
Faced with an existential rival in the Soviet Union, the American state used its cultural apparatus to unify the domestic tribe, eliminate internal subversion, and enforce coalition loyalty. Whitfield views the era as a dark departure from liberal norms, whereas Mearsheimer’s anthropology reveals it as the standard behavior of a social animal organizing for systemic conflict.
In In Search of American Jewish Culture, Whitfield explores how Jewish artists, writers, and intellectuals transformed the American mainstream while preserving their specific heritage. He views the evolution of American Jewish identity as a creative, pluralistic negotiation—a testament to the fluid capacity of a liberal society to accommodate distinct subcultures.
Mearsheimer’s realism strips away this pluralistic optimism. The assimilation and cultural synthesis Whitfield tracks is a structural capitulation to a dominant survival vehicle. Under conditions of domestic competition, minority coalitions adapt their public narratives, artistic expressions, and language to align with the dominant state structure to secure their safety and status. The shift from parochial immigrant culture to a broader “American Jewish culture” is the predictable operation of the human animal maximizing its position within a safe, wealthy empire. Whitfield treats this cultural hybridization as a victory for liberal pluralism; Mearsheimer’s model shows it is a tactical adaptation by a sub-group within a dominant tribe.
Whitfield has frequently written about the “anomaly” of American Jewish voting patterns, analyzing why a community that largely ascended into the upper-middle class maintained a persistent, multi-generational loyalty to the Democratic Party and liberal social reform, unlike other upwardly mobile ethnic groups.
In A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till, Whitfield provides a definitive historical account of the 1955 lynching and its catalytic effect on the Civil Rights Movement. He frames the white supremacist violence of the Jim Crow South as an archaic, irrational ideology that stood in direct contradiction to the foundational creed of American democracy.
Mearsheimer’s realism challenges this ideological framing by looking at the raw logic of group dominance under conditions of local anarchy. The enforcement of Jim Crow was not a temporary malfunction of a democratic ideal; it was the standard, brutal operation of a dominant coalition maintaining its status, resources, and power over a rival group. The intense socialization of white children in the Jim Crow South infused them with a rigid, unreflective group identity designed to defend territorial and social dominance at all costs. What Whitfield analyzes as a moral and ideological aberration is the predictable behavior of the human animal when structured into an unyielding, competitive hierarchy.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology, paired with David Pinsof’s alliance theory, offers a structural explanation that bypasses Whitfield’s focus on ideological exceptionalism. Humans do not form political preferences through independent, rational economic calculation. The long human childhood allows families and cohesive sub-communities to impose an intense value infusion on individuals long before their critical faculties mature. The persistence of the liberal Jewish vote is the result of early group socialization and coalition alignment. The community maintains its political loyalty because the Democratic coalition historically served as the primary instrument for managing its security, reputation, and status against rival domestic factions. What Whitfield analyzes as a fascinating ideological paradox is the standard holding power of early tribal socialization.
Throughout his biographical essays on figures like Hannah Arendt, Dwight Macdonald, and Irving Howe, Whitfield celebrates the role of the independent public intellectual. He values these thinkers for their capacity to step outside the tribal consensus, challenge state power, and deploy critical reason in defense of universal human dignity.
Mearsheimer’s ranking of human faculties reveals that this independent status is a social mirage. Reason ranks last among the sources of preference. Intellectuals do not operate as unconditioned agents floating above the fray; they are social animals whose writing serves to manage reputations, signal loyalty, and claim authority within an elite sub-coalition. The “independent” critics Whitfield profiles were simply members of a highly cohesive, secular intellectual tribe that used the language of universal dissent to compete for status and moral superiority against the political and corporate establishment. Their critical reason did not liberate them from tribalism; it was the specific instrument they used to build and defend their own tribe.
A recurring theme in Whitfield’s broader scholarship is the sharp, moral contrast between totalitarian regimes (which use total state terror to crush human agency) and liberal democracies (which protect individual choice and pluralism). He treats totalitarianism as a unique disease of Western civilization that completely rewrites human nature.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology implies that the fundamental nature of the creature does not change across regimes. Men are intensely social and dependent on the group for survival, whether they live under Stalin or Eisenhower. Totalitarianism is not a psychological mutation; it is the radical scaling up of state optimization under conditions of extreme geopolitical competition. A state facing existential threats will use every tool available—intensive socialization, surveillance, and ideological policing—to enforce internal conformity and maximize its power. The difference between the conformity Whitfield documents in The Culture of the Cold War and the conformity of a totalitarian state is a difference of degree, not of kind. Both systems reflect the same structural reality: the individual is always subordinate to the survival vehicle of the state.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof is right, Whitfield’s history of the Cold War is an elegant misreading of a highly strategic conflict. The conformity, super-patriotism, and blacklists of the McCarthy era were not a psychological pathology or a mass misunderstanding of democratic principles. They were tools used in a raw competition for power.
Whitfield focused heavily on the social cost of the “red stigma,” documenting how the mere accusation of communist sympathy could destroy a career in Hollywood or the university system. To a liberal historian, this looks like a dark breakdown of reason—a moment when a nation forgot its constitutional ideals.From Pinsof’s perspective, the red stigma was a highly functional device. The political actors, studio executives, and university boards who weaponized anticommunism were not suffering from an error in judgment. They were locked in zero-sum competition over institutional real estate and the state apparatus.
Branding an opponent a communist was the ultimate way to marginalize a rival faction and capture their market share of cultural influence. Pinsof’s logic shows that the participants understood exactly what they were doing. The demonization of the left was a useful weapon to wield in a high-stakes domestic fight.
By writing The Culture of the Cold War and Into the Dark: Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism, Whitfield positioned the intellectual as the clear-eyed observer who steps in to diagnose society’s ideological neuroses. The underlying assumption of his work is that the public and the politicians were blinded by ideological rigidity, and that the analytical historian is needed to chart the boundaries of that blindness.
Pinsof reveals the self-serving logic behind this stance. Intellectuals love to diagnose past eras as periods of “paranoia” or “mass hysteria” because it implies that the masses are fundamentally broken and need the expert guidance of the university class to stay sane. It turns a historical struggle over state loyalty and power into a mental mistake.
By framing the Cold War consensus as a psychological malfunction rather than a rational, coalitional conflict, the academic elite secures its own position at the top of the moral hierarchy, collecting prestige for correcting the record.
A recurring theme in Whitfield’s work—including his exploration of race relations in A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till—is the tragedy of a society failing to live up to its stated commitment to freedom and justice. He treats these historical moments as failures of understanding, where prejudice blinded citizens to human decency.
Pinsof’s essay shows that society did not fail to understand its ideals; it simply prioritized its actual motives. The actors enforcing segregation in the South or executing the blacklists in Washington were not confused about the language of the Constitution. They were protecting their immediate group status, resources, and control over local and national power structures.
Whitfield’s work serves a clear class function: it provides a sophisticated, text-based lens to study the hole of human conflict, ensuring that the study of past failures remains a valuable academic commodity while leaving the underlying, Darwinian logic of the competition completely untouched.

Posted in America | Comments Off

The Hero System of Literary Critic Robert Alter

Posted on June 25, 2026 by Luke Ford

Robert Alter (b. 1935) gives part of a working morning to the word “and.”

In the Hebrew of Genesis the verses run on the conjunction vav. And the earth welter and waste. And darkness over the deep. And God said. The committees that built the modern English Bibles cut most of these. Smooth English subordinates. It ranks its clauses, folds the small ones into the large, and hurries on. Alter keeps the chain. He keeps it because the chain carries the meaning, the sense of acts set down side by side under one gaze. Subordinate the clauses and you think for the reader. You trade the Hebrew for the prose of a curriculum committee.

A reader might go thirty pages without seeing the fight. Alter has built a life on it.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gave us a way to read a life built on a small fight. A man cannot live well as an animal that knows it will die. So he joins a scheme that tells him his days add up to something the grave cannot cancel. Becker called these schemes hero systems. Each one hands out the terms of cosmic worth. Each one says: do this, and you will have counted. The schemes disagree. What reads as heroism inside one reads as vanity or sin in the next. And here is the part that does the work in Alter’s case. The rival schemes reach for the same words. They say fidelity, they say the word, they say sacred, and each one cashes the word at its own counter, for its own coin.

Alter spent twenty-four years on the whole Hebrew Bible in English, three volumes, the commentary running under the text on every page. Norton published it in 2018. Before that came the studies that made his name, The Art of Biblical Narrative in 1981 and The Art of Biblical Poetry in 1985, and the late defense of his method, The Art of Bible Translation in 2019. The titles keep one word. Art. That word opens the door into his hero system.

Alter brackets God. He will not tell you whether the Author of Genesis is the Lord or a guild of ancient writers of supreme gift. He treats the brackets as the price of his craft and the source of his freedom. The reverence stays. He gives the text the close attention a believer gives a commandment, and he gives it for a reason a believer might not accept: the Hebrew is the finest narrative art the ancient world produced, and a man owes great art his whole care. His immortality bid runs through that care. The translator dies. The English he made might carry the Hebrew across, rough surface intact, so that the thing he served does not thin out into easy modern prose on his watch. The vessel outlasts the hand. He earns his place by keeping the original from dying in his own language.

This puts a strange shape on his heroism. Most hero systems reward the mark a man leaves. Build, win, name the tower after yourself. Alter’s reward comes from the mark he refuses to leave. The good translator gets out of the way. He does not improve the Hebrew. He does not smooth the hard verse so a reader thanks him for the help. He keeps the body parts the committees turn into abstractions, the loins and the seed and the hand, because the Hebrew imagines the world through the body and the translator has no warrant to imagine it some cleaner way. The labor hides itself. Done right, the reader sees the Bible and not the man.

And yet the three volumes carry his name, and his commentary fills the lower half of every page, the loudest footnotes in the field. The self-effacing translator turns out to be the most present annotator at the table. The paradox resolves once you see what the gloss guards. Alter restores the rough Hebrew surface in the line, then stands beside the line in the notes to tell the reader the roughness is design, not failure, and not a thing to be fixed by the next reviser. The annotator protects the translator’s restraint. Both the silence in the verse and the noise in the margin serve one end. Do not mistake the smooth gloss for the text.

Now run his master word through the other counters.

Say fidelity to a court reporter and she thinks of the record. Verbatim. The um and the half-sentence and the witness who talks over the lawyer, all of it down, none of it tidied. Her heroism lies in adding nothing. Her ledger is the transcript that holds up on appeal twenty years on, after she is gone. She and Alter share a creed at the level of the hand: change no word. They part on the why. She serves the law’s need for a fixed past. He serves the survival of an art.

Say it to a luthier and fidelity means the dead master’s pattern and the grain of the spruce. He bends the wood the way the wood wants to bend, and the way the man who taught his teacher bent it. His mark counts as a flaw. The instrument should sound like the tradition, not like him. Here the kinship with Alter runs deep, the craftsman who hides inside the made thing, and still the schemes differ, because the luthier wants a sound and Alter wants a sense.

Say it to a Marine and fidelity means the man on your left and the man on your right. Semper Fidelis binds you to the unit, the corps, the dead of prior wars. The word points at people, not at a text. Betray the words of an order to save the men and you might keep faith in the only ledger that counts for him. The same six letters, a wholly other debt.

Say it to a man dubbing an American comedy into Italian and fidelity bends again. He must hit the lip movement and land the laugh at the same beat. To do that he throws out the line. The joke about a baseball team becomes a joke about a soccer club. He keeps faith with the effect and discards the words, and inside his trade that choice reads as skill, not treason. Eugene Nida (1914-2011) gave this approach its name in Bible work, dynamic equivalence, and built a school on it: the faithful translation makes the new reader feel what the first reader felt, and the words are the freight, not the cargo. Alter spent his late career against that school. For Nida’s heirs the missionary’s harvest sets the standard, the largest number of souls reached in the plainest words. For Alter the words are the cargo. Two projects, both flying the flag of faithfulness to Scripture, sailing in opposite directions.

Say it to an art restorer and fidelity splits the room. One restorer fills the loss so the eye glides over the repair and the painting looks whole. Another leaves the patch a shade off, honest about the wound, faithful to the object’s true age. They quarrel in their journals over which one keeps faith. Alter stands with the second man. He leaves the hard verse hard. He does not fill the gap to spare the reader the difficulty, because the difficulty belongs to the text and the reader has a right to meet it.

The word itself does the same trick. Take the word.

Say the word to a textualist judge and the word binds. The statute means what its words meant to an ordinary reader the year they passed. Intentions in a legislator’s heart do not govern. The marks on the page do. His heroism lies in submission to the text against his own preference, and in that posture he and Alter rhyme, though the judge guards a republic and Alter guards a poem.

Say the word to a software engineer and the word is the spec, and the compiler forgives nothing. The literal rules because the machine reads the literal and only the literal. A near-meaning crashes the build. He lives by a fidelity so strict it has no mercy in it at all, and no reverence either, which marks the floor below which Alter’s care never falls. Alter’s literalism keeps awe. The engineer’s keeps the program running. The same exactness, a different god.

Say the word to a man who wants three Hebrew letters cut into his forearm and cannot read them, and the word turns to charm. He wears the script for its weight, its claim on something old and strong, and the sense drops away entirely. He keeps faith with the aura and not the meaning. Alter spent a quarter century on the meaning and let the aura take care of itself. Two men, one alphabet, opposite hungers.

The clearest test sits in his own discipline. The Hebrew Bible repeats itself. The same young man meets the same kind of woman at the same well and a betrothal follows. It happens for Isaac’s servant, for Jacob, for Moses, with changes each time. The source critics who descend from Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) read repetition as evidence of stitching, two old documents spliced by a later hand, and the joints show. Their heroism lies in the cut, the recovery of the strata, the science that takes the received text apart and dates the pieces. Alter looks at the same repetition and names it a type scene, a pattern the author sets up so the reader feels the force of each change against it. Where the critic sees a clumsy splice, Alter sees a composer playing a known tune in a new key. Same verses on the page. Opposite verdicts. The critic earns his worth by dissection. Alter earns his by showing design. Each man needs the text to be the thing his ledger pays out on, a corpse to autopsy or a work of art to read.

One last counter, and the most surprising alliance. An Orthodox man stands at the lectern on a Sabbath morning and reads the Torah scroll. He changes no letter. A single wrong word and the congregation calls him back to repeat it. He and the Berkeley professor, the secular literary critic who brackets God, do the same thing with their hands. Touch not one word. Becker tells us why two such men can share the conduct and not the creed. For the reader at the lectern the letters came down by dictation and bind the covenant, and his task is to submit. For Robert Alter the letters are the achievement of a genius he will not name, and his task is to attend. Submission and attention put the same instruction in the hand and a different sky overhead. The alliance holds in the deed and breaks at the altar. Each might call the accessibility committee unfaithful, and the committee, keeping its own faith with the lost reader it means to reach, calls them both antiquarians who would rather guard a beautiful corpse than feed the living. Inside each ledger, every man is right.

Which returns us to the word “and.”

The committee cuts it for the high schooler who might stumble on a run of clauses. The believer reads it aloud and dares not drop it. Alter keeps it on the page in English because the Hebrew thought in that long unhurried chain and a man owes the chain his care. The conjunction holds three hero systems at once, and each one means a different thing by keeping faith with the Book. Alter chose his counter long ago. He stands at it still, one syllable at a time, betting that the Hebrew will outlast him if he can keep his own hand light enough.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology provides a striking, structural confirmation of the literary and biblical scholarship of Robert Alter (b. 1935), while radically recontextualizing the ultimate source and function of the literary masterpieces Alter has spent his career analyzing.
Mearsheimer’s realism intersects with Alter’s literary humanism across several key principles.
Alter shows that biblical narrative relies heavily on conventions and “type-scenes”—such as a future leader meeting his betrothed at a well, or a fateful encounter in the wilderness. He argues that the ancient audience understood these conventions, and that writers manipulated them to build deep psychological and moral nuance.
If Mearsheimer is right, these conventions are the precise mechanism of intense social group bonding. The human animal survives through childhood by downloading the group’s established store of stories, norms, and codes before independent reason matures. The type-scenes Alter identifies are not merely clever aesthetic devices; they are the structured delivery vehicles for the deep value infusion that binds an individual to his tribe. The repetitive, conventional architecture of the Hebrew Bible ensures that the community’s moral code is deeply embedded in the individual’s mind, locking down group identity long before critical faculties can challenge it.
Alter’s analysis emphasizes how the biblical writers used narrative innovation to chart a new, revolutionary path away from polytheism toward a single, transcendent, and historically engaged God. He views this literary breakthrough as an expansion of human consciousness, capturing the complex, unpredictable relationship between human agency and divine will.
Mearsheimer’s worldview, combined with David Pinsof’s alliance theory, strips the metaphysical romance from this transition. The move from local polytheism to an overarching monotheism is the ultimate historical optimization of a survival vehicle. In an anarchic world where groups face continuous competition, a shared, totalizing covenant with one supreme God creates unparalleled internal cohesion. The literary sophistication Alter details—the intricate dialogues, the subtle ironies, the historical tracking—served to forge a highly disciplined and resilient national coalition. The biblical text did not evolve to expand cosmic awareness for its own sake; it evolved to preserve a distinct people against the existential threat of larger empires.
As a professor of comparative literature, Alter has defended the classical humanist model of reading. He treats great literature—whether the Book of David, Franz Kafka, or James Joyce—as an arena where an individual reader can engage in detached, self-reflective contemplation, testing and refining his own moral faculties against the text.
Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of human preferences places independent reason and self-reflection last, far behind early socialization and inborn sentiment. This upends Alter’s humanist classroom. A man does not read the story of King David as an unconditioned moral agent. His interpretation is filtered through the specific tribal loyalty and moral code infused into him during his long childhood. The deep aesthetic appreciation Alter cultivates is a refined product of socialization, not an escape from it. When a group faces a crisis of survival or intense scarcity, the complex literary ambiguities Alter highlights are discarded, and the text is instantly weaponized to serve the immediate, unreflective solidarity of the coalition.
One of Alter’s most celebrated insights in The Art of Biblical Narrative is the concept of “narrative reticence”—the deliberate economy of the text regarding a character’s internal thoughts, motives, or psychological states. Alter argues that these gaps force the reader into a sophisticated process of moral interpretation and psychological evaluation, reflecting a worldview that sees human nature as complex, unpredictable, and deeply layered.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology provides a functional, realist explanation for this structural reticence. In an anarchic world where group survival is paramount, the primary concern of a foundation narrative is not to cultivate individual psychological exploration or detached aesthetic appreciation. The text minimizes internal monologue and prioritizes outward action because it is designed to codify behavior, enforce social roles, and emphasize collective consequence. The characters in the Bible are judged by their loyalty to the covenant, their military leadership, and their obedience to the group’s laws—not by their private emotional states. The narrative gaps Alter details exist because human survival depends on collective action and external compliance, making individual psychological interiority an evolutionary secondary priority.
Alter wrote extensively about the “uncompromising realism” of the Book of Samuel, noting how it presents a gritty, unvarnished look at the raw mechanics of political power, familial betrayal, court intrigue, and the bloody founding of the Israelite monarchy. Alter treats this as a profound literary breakthrough that captured the tragic contradictions of human nature and historical change.
Mearsheimer’s framework confirms that this literary realism is simply an accurate recording of political realism. The Book of Samuel describes a classic anarchic environment: a collection of loosely aligned tribes facing a powerful regional enemy (the Philistines) while struggling to establish centralized authority internally. The text does not shy away from the brutal, pragmatic calculations of King David or Joab because it reflects a world where states must maximize their power to survive. What Alter analyzes as an aesthetic and theological achievement is the historical documentation of the social animal inventing the centralized state mechanism to escape destruction by external rivals.
In his monumental, multi-decade project translating the entire Hebrew Bible, Alter argued that previous translations failed because they ignored the specific poetic rhythms, wordplay, and linguistic textures of the original Hebrew. He sought to restore the parochial, local character of the ancient text, believing that a precise literary translation can accurately convey its unique genius to a modern, secular audience.
Mearsheimer’s critique of liberal universalism reveals the inherent limitation of Alter’s cosmopolitan project. Liberalism assumes that human beings are interchangeable actors who can seamlessly transcend cultural boundaries through reason and education. Alter’s emphasis on the untranslatable, deeply embedded nature of biblical Hebrew actually supports Mearsheimer’s thesis: language and culture are parochial products of specific social groups, designed to lock in internal cohesion and exclude outsiders. A modern, secular reader can appreciate Alter’s translation as an intellectual exercise, but he cannot download the deep value infusion that the original text provided to the ancient community. The text remains an artifact of a specific tribal survival vehicle, and its binding power cannot be universally translated across an anarchic, fragmented world.
If Mearsheimer is right, Alter has mapped the machinery of the Western world’s most successful survival text with unmatched precision. He correctly saw that the Hebrew Bible is a brilliant, unified engine designed to form human consciousness. His realist correction is simply that this magnificent literary apparatus does not exist to liberate the individual intellect, but to anchor the social animal firmly within the protective walls of the tribe.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof is right, Alter did not rescue the Bible from dry historicism. He rescued it from a rival elite to secure a new monopoly for the literary critic.
For centuries, the Hebrew Bible was the ultimate prize in cultural warfare. The traditional clergy held a monopoly on its meaning, using it to enforce moral behavior and maintain social order. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, secular historians and linguists launched a successful raid on that power, using “higher criticism” to reduce the text to an accidental collection of ancient bureaucratic fragments.
Pinsof’s logic shows that Alter’s literary intervention was a counter-raid. By framing the Bible as supreme prose and poetry, Alter wrestled the text away from both the priests and the historians, placing it firmly on the syllabus of the comparative literature department.
The literary critic became the new high priest. You no longer needed faith or an archaeology degree to unlock the ultimate book of Western civilization; you needed a training in narrative structure and aesthetic taste. Alter did not uncover a disinterested truth about ancient art; he executed a successful turf grab, turning religious scripture into elite academic capital.
Alter introduced the concept of the “biblical type-scene”—the idea that ancient audiences instantly understood recurring setups, like a future leader meeting his bride at a well (Abraham’s servant, Jacob, Moses). He argued that variations in these formulas conveyed deep psychological and theological nuances that modern readers miss due to cultural distance.
From Pinsof’s perspective, this is a beautiful deployment of the misunderstanding myth. The text seems confusing or repetitive to the public only because they lack the proper literary tools. Alter creates a market for his own intervention. By insisting that the Bible’s true genius is locked behind ancient artistic conventions, he guarantees that the public cannot access their own heritage without an academic guide. The type-scene becomes an intellectual filter that keeps the masses dependent on the professional critic for enlightenment.
Traditional scholars argued that the Bible’s contradictions—like duplicate stories or shifting styles—proved it was written by multiple, uncoordinated authors over centuries. Alter argued instead that these tensions were deliberate, sophisticated literary choices designed to reflect the messy, complex nature of human reality and monotheism.
Pinsof’s essay reveals that keeping the text unified through complexity is highly functional for the critic. If the text is just a broken, historical accident, the conversation ends. But if the contradictions are actually a brilliant, complex design, the interpretation can go on forever. By framing the Bible’s internal friction as a deep literary puzzle rather than a simple historical oversight, Alter ensured that his own class would remain permanently employed to analyze the hole. He took a raw, historical document used for ancient political consolidation and dressed it up as a timeless masterpiece of human perception, ensuring his own name would be forever attached to the most valuable canon in history.

Posted in English, Hebrew, Jews, Judaism | Comments Off

‘The journey is over. Love to all.’

Posted on June 25, 2026 by Luke Ford

One fall morning in 2003 Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (1926-2003) walks through Manhattan with her friend Mary Ann Caws (b. 1933). She says she feels sad. Caws asks why. Heilbrun answers, “The universe.” Then she goes home. The next morning her family finds her with a plastic bag over her head and the sleeping pills gone. The note runs seven words. “The journey is over. Love to all.”

Her son tells reporters she carried no illness, no diagnosis, no decline anyone could name. She was seventy-seven and in good health. She judged the story finished, so she finished it.

To read that death as despair reads it from the wrong hero system. Heilbrun spent forty years teaching women to seize authorship of their own lives. The death was the last sentence she wrote, and she meant it to scan.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives us the frame. Man knows he will die. He cannot live inside that knowledge, so he builds a hero system, a scheme of significance that lets him feel he counts in something larger than his body and longer than his years. The hero system tells him what earns honor and what earns shame. It hands him a way to deny the grave by purchasing symbolic immortality. Sacred values are the coins of that economy. A man spends his life chasing the coin his system mints, and he dies defending the conviction that the coin is real.

The coin Heilbrun minted has a name. She called it the plot, and she taught women to refuse the plots the culture had stamped for them. Fiction about women, she argued, fixed on a girl whose fate hung unsettled, while the men got the questing, destiny-making hero. Two endings waited for the heroine, marriage or death, and both closed the book. So she made a curse word of closure. Closure was the passive life. Closure was contentment as a sedative. In Writing a Woman’s Life (1988) she told women that adventure starts at the moment they stop hoping for the thing to be over, settled, swept clear. The hero does not reach closure. The hero keeps the road open.

This is the heart of her system, and it explains a death that looks, from outside, like the one act she preached against. She did not fear endings. She feared imposed endings. The marriage plot writes the woman. Old age writes the body. Decline composes a final chapter no one chose, the slow loss Becker keeps pointing at, the animal truth under every hero system, that the body fails and soils and rots and drags the proud self down with it. Heilbrun called that chapter the miserable endgame. Her solution holds the logic of her whole life. If the body means to write the last page, seize the pen first. Authored closure is not the enemy. Authored closure is the throne. The pen, not the plot.

Hold the word completion up to the light and watch it change color in each hand that takes it.

In Heilbrun’s hand, completion means the ending she composed instead of the ending that composed her. The chosen death is the final proof that the self, not the body and not the culture, holds the pen. Becker would recognize the move at once. The hero system makes its last stand against creatureliness at the exact spot where creatureliness wins. She refused to be a character. She insisted on staying the author through the final line.

Now put the same word in the hand of an Orthodox Jew, which is the world Heilbrun left behind. She described her parents as humanistic Jews, and she walked from the synagogue into the secular academy and never looked back. In the world she left, the body is not hers to spend. It is borrowed. The soul returns when He calls it home and not one hour before. Completion there means the commandment kept, the deathbed Shema, the endurance held to the appointed time. To name your own hour is to steal what belongs to Him and to call the theft freedom. The pen she prized is, in that hand, a thing no man owns. Same word. Opposite content. The exit she chose is the one exit her grandparents’ world forbids without exception.

Hand the word to a Stoic and it warms again, because here she finds an ancestor. Seneca (c. 4 BC-AD 65) and Cato the Younger (95-46 BC) taught that the wise man keeps an open door. The chosen death proves that the tyrant, the disease, the slow ruin, none of them owns him. Completion means the rational exit taken on one’s own terms while the mind stays clear. Heilbrun’s hero system did not spring from nothing. It descends from this. Strip the feminism and her logic is old Roman, the citizen who walks out of the banquet before the host can throw him out.

Hand it to a hospice chaplain and the color goes cold. For the chaplain a good death is received, not authored. Completion means surrender, presence, reconciliation, the hand held at the end. The point of the last mile is the company on it. The chaplain hears “the journey is over” and grieves that she walked that mile alone by design, having built a life and a craft around the conviction that the self should never need company to finish a sentence.

Hand it to Diane Coleman (b. 1953), who founded a movement of disabled people against assisted death, and the word turns dangerous. Praise a healthy woman of seventy-seven for erasing herself and call it her freedom, and a message travels straight to the wheelchair and the nursing home and the ledger. If the self-chosen death of the able is heroism, the continued life of the dependent starts to look like a failure of nerve, or worse, a cost. Completion-by-choice becomes an expectation pressed on the people society would rather not fund. The sharp part is that Coleman and Heilbrun both stand inside the same feminism. One woman’s autonomy is the other woman’s death sentence dressed as a right.

Hand it, last, to a woman who cleans the apartments. Heilbrun authored her life from a high floor on the Upper West Side, with a country house upstate and a summer place in Alford and a fresh home bought at sixty-eight for the sole purpose of being alone in it. A room of one’s own, and then several more rooms. Her son recalled that she stopped giving dinner parties and had her groceries delivered, since squeezing oranges at Fairway wasted time she meant to spend writing. Time was the luxury. The authored plot runs on it. For the woman who delivers those groceries, completion might mean the last child raised and the rent made one more month, not a chapter she got to compose at leisure. The status detail does the argument. Authorship is a commodity, and Heilbrun could afford the whole inventory.

So her hero system stood on a foundation few could rent, and she knew the cost of standing on it inside the academy. She published fifteen mystery novels as Amanda Cross and hid the name for years, because the scholars’ hero system coded detective fiction as unserious, a thing a serious mind would not stoop to. She split herself to protect the half that earned the academy’s coin. A fan unmasked her through copyright records. The immortality project leaves a paper trail. Then came the long fight at Columbia, where she became the first woman tenured in the English department in 1972 and spent the years after, by her account, kept off the committees that ran the place, ridiculed, ignored. A former dean read her charge of ongoing bias and called it “rubbish.” She remembered Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) choosing his disciples among the young men and holding the young women at a distance, while Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) became, in time, a friend. She built for other women the hero system the men had denied her, and she taught a generation to want the quest.

Then she walked one mile with Caws, said the universe made her sad, went home, and closed the book on her terms.

Read the seven words of her note from inside her system and they read as a triumph, the author’s signature on a finished work. Read them from the synagogue and they read as a theft from Him. Read them from the Stoic’s porch and they read as the open door used well. Read them from the chaplain’s chair and they read as a hand let go too soon. Read them from the wheelchair and they read as a warning to everyone whose life costs more than it earns. Read them from the kitchen where the oranges get squeezed and they read as a luxury good. Becker’s point sits under all six readings. There is no view from nowhere. Each of us reads the note from inside the scheme that lets us feel we count, and the word completion will keep changing color for as long as there are different ways to deny the grave.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology subverts the feminist literary criticism and social theories of Carolyn Gold Heilbrun whose work operates on the central premise that gender roles and identities are artificial, restrictive social constructs that individual reason can dismantle.
In Toward a Recognition of Androgyny, she argued for a modification of conventional masculine and feminine traits, treating gender fluidity as a liberating path toward greater human rationality and peace. In Writing a Woman’s Life, she claimed that women can actively “reinvent” their narratives and gain autonomy by consciously stepping outside the cultural scripts written for them by a patriarchal society. Mearsheimer’s realism upends Heilbrun’s emancipatory project in several ways.
Heilbrun treats a woman’s life narrative as something that can be self-consciously redesigned through critical reflection and new literary models. If Mearsheimer is right, this capacity for individual self-authoring is an illusion. Because humans have a long childhood characterized by intense socialization, the family and surrounding society impose an overwhelming value infusion on the individual long before her critical faculties develop. By the time a woman is mature enough to read feminist critique or attempt to rewrite her life, her foundational moral code, behavioral constraints, and social attachments are already fixed. The individual does not rewrite her cultural script; the cultural script has already manufactured the individual.
Heilbrun viewed rigid gender roles as unnecessary historical aberrations—artificial barriers that could be dissolved through the adoption of an androgynous ideal. Mearsheimer’s anthropology implies that these social arrangements are not arbitrary constraints that can be rationalized away; they are structures designed for group survival. Throughout human history, societies have specialized roles to protect the long childhood of human offspring and to maximize collective cohesion against rival groups. What Heilbrun diagnoses as a patriarchal distortion of human potential is the standard operating setup of the social animal under conditions of anarchic competition. A society that abandons these functional, cohesive structures in favor of individualized, fluid identity projects risks fracturing the very unit that ensures its security.
Heilbrun spent her career fighting to institutionalize feminist criticism and expand opportunities for women in the academy, treating the university as a space that should be governed by universal principles of equality and merit. Mearsheimer’s model, paired with David Pinsof’s alliance theory, suggests a far more calculated function for the feminist academic movement. The push to “decentralize” the traditional canon and establish gender studies was not a neutral triumph of objective reason; it was a highly sophisticated strategy deployed by an elite intellectual coalition. By organizing around a shared moral creed, Heilbrun and her allies successfully claimed institutional power, rewarded loyal partners, managed reputations, and policed boundaries against their status rivals in the traditional academic establishment.
In her later works, including The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty (1997), Heilbrun argued that as a woman enters her sixties, she finally escapes the reproductive and domestic demands of society. Heilbrun treated old age as a revolutionary threshold where a woman can discard her lifelong social programming, achieve an unconditioned autonomy, and live entirely for herself.
Mearsheimer’s realism shows that this late-stage liberation is an anthropological fiction. A man or woman is a profoundly social being from the start to the finish of life. The intense value infusion received during childhood is not a temporary skin that can be shed in old age; it is the permanent architecture of the mind. When an older woman attempts to step outside the conventions of her society, she does not enter a post-tribal space of pure individual reason. She simply remains dependent on the broader state structure that ensures her safety and material survival, mistaking the security provided by her group for absolute personal independence.
Heilbrun wrote extensively about the unique value of female friendship and exclusive women’s networks, treating them as egalitarian sanctuaries free from the aggressive, competitive, and hierarchical logic of male-dominated institutions. She viewed these groups as models for a more peaceful, non-combative human future.
Mearsheimer’s worldview, supplemented by Pinsof’s alliance theory, strips the romanticism from these arrangements. Exclusive networks—whether male or female—are not escapes from politics; they are primary political instruments. Humans form groups to cooperate internally so they can compete more effectively externally. The women’s groups Heilbrun championed operate on the exact same structural logic as any other tribe: they use intense socialization to enforce internal conformity, punish members who break ranks, and mobilize collective power to claim resources and status from rival groups. The language of mutual support and egalitarian peace is the ideological standard used to bind the coalition together.
Heilbrun’s entire career as a critic and professor rested on the liberal belief that by rewriting literary scripts—such as the feminist detective fiction she wrote under the pseudonym Amanda Cross—she could gradually re-engineer human behavior and reduce societal conflict. She trusted that exposure to alternative narratives would expand individual reason and empathy, leading to a more rational world order.
Mearsheimer’s ranking of human faculties reveals why this pedagogical project has a built-in breaking point. Reason is the least important of the three sources of preference. A collection of progressive novels cannot override the primal, unreflective survival instincts that emerge when groups face real scarcity or existential competition. Heilbrun’s belief that narrative could civilize the species ignores the permanent reality of structural anarchy. When the baseline security of a society is threatened, the sophisticated literary models Heilbrun designed are instantly overridden by the raw solidarity required for the group to survive.
If Mearsheimer is right, Heilbrun’s faith in the liberating potential of literature and the individual intellect overestimates the power of independent reason. Women, like men, remain social animals whose primary environment is the protective vehicle of the group, and they cannot simply think their way out of the deep socialization that ensures collective survival.

‘A Big Misunderstanding’

If David Pinsof is right, Heilbrun’s entire academic and literary project was built on a masterful deployment of the misunderstanding myth to capture institutional power for a new coalition.
In Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (1973), Heilbrun argued that civilization was destroying itself through excessive, polarized masculinity, as evidenced by the Vietnam War. Her solution was a move toward androgyny—the fluid blending of masculine and feminine traits. She framed gender polarization as a historical mistake, a cultural misunderstanding that could be cured by a revolution in consciousness.
From Pinsof’s perspective, sexual dimorphism and gendered behaviors are not an arbitrary cultural whoopsie or a conceptual error. They are evolved, highly strategic configurations driven by reproductive competition, resource acquisition, and coalitional survival.
By framing these deeply rooted biological and social structures as a mere “misunderstanding” that could be corrected by literary analysis, Heilbrun achieved a massive status lift. She positioned the feminist literary scholar not just as an analyst of books, but as an essential civilizational savior who holds the blueprint to end war and violence.
In Writing a Woman’s Life (1988), Heilbrun argued that women had been trapped for centuries because they lacked the proper narratives to imagine independent lives outside of marriage and domesticity. She claimed that the patriarchy maintained control by depriving women of text, and that by writing new biographies and analyzing hidden narratives, women could achieve liberation.
Pinsof’s logic reveals the strategic utility of this argument. Women do not make choices about career, family, and status because they are hypnotized by a bad script or because they lack an adequate library. They make choices based on the actual incentives, trade-offs, and competitive constraints of their immediate environments.
By inventing the idea that women are paralyzed by a lack of narrative, Heilbrun created a vast market for her own profession. If liberation requires the curation, decoding, and writing of complex texts, then society desperately needs university professors and literary critics to guide them. The “lack of narrative” is an intellectual fiction that transforms a raw struggle over domestic and economic resources into an academic curation project.
For decades, Heilbrun kept her identity as mystery writer Amanda Cross a strict secret until copyright records exposed her. She stated that she hid her popular fiction because Columbia’s traditionalist, male-dominated English department would have used her commercial writing to deny her tenure, viewing it as insufficiently serious.
Under Pinsof’s frame, this secrecy was a flawless exercise in elite resource acquisition. Heilbrun understood the zero-sum nature of academic warfare perfectly. She knew her colleagues were competitors fighting for limited tenure slots and institutional authority.
By adopting a pseudonym, she successfully extracted capital from two completely different markets simultaneously: she gained mass popularity and financial profit from the public as Amanda Cross, while maintaining the pure, high-status, anti-commercial credentials required to win the tenure fight at Columbia as Dr. Heilbrun. She did not change the rules of the academic hierarchy; she played them with expert strategic duplicity
In 1992, Heilbrun abruptly retired from Columbia University, declaring that she was doing so to protest the department’s institutional discrimination and hatred toward women. She framed her departure as a moral sacrifice, a public protest against a structural failure of equity and fairness.
Pinsof’s essay shows that partisan conflict within an institution is a fight over the coercive apparatus of that institution — who gets hired, who gets funded, and whose ideology controls the curriculum. Heilbrun’s public retirement was not a retreat; it was a high-stakes tactical strike.
By leveraging her immense cultural capital and using the language of moral martyrdom, she successfully infamized her departmental rivals in the national press. It was a dirty fight wrapped in the language of justice. She used her retirement to permanently brand her opponents as backward bigots, ensuring that even in her absence, her progressive coalition would hold the moral high ground and eventual control over the department’s future.

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